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PC Drivers & Software

Breaker_
Adept I

Full AMD System; StoreMI-related issues

I am writing this not to ask for help, but to pass along information.  My hope is that it may be helpful to those who use AMD StoreMI and have a "crashy" system.  My system info is at the bottom of this post.

This all started when I was neither able to check the health of my Gigabyte NVMe SSD, nor update its firmware.  It wouldn't show up in its "SSD Toolbox" software.  After a lot of back and forth with Gigabyte's support staff, they were unable to find the issue.  It is the drive that has Windows 11 installed onto it, so the drive was working.  While troubleshooting, I found that detailed information for neither of my NVMe drives showed in other programs, such as AIDA64.  In fact, CrystalDiskInfo showed that I didn't have any storage drives installed at all.

When I started delving deeper into the issue, I found that AMD StoreMI installs drivers for the storage devices on the PC.  This includes replacing the drivers that were installed for both of my NVMe drives.  A SATA SSD and a hard disk were paired via StoreMI.  None of the other drives were used with StoreMI.

I decided to uninstall StoreMI.  Once StoreMI was removed, all of the other software I use for updates/monitoring began to work.

This is where the "crashy" part I mentioned comes in.  The RX 6800 XT is new to my system.  I had an NVIDIA card before, so I decided to back up my data, format all of my drives, and start fresh.  After installing Windows, its updates, and drivers for the chipset, GPU, etc., I decided to install StoreMI (and then restore my data), as it was on my system before the new GPU install. Before removing StoreMI, I would have random, seemingly GPU-related crashes.  If I attempted to run a game/software installed onto my secondary EX920 NVMe, I would often get BSODs as soon as it tried to launch.  While watching YouTube videos, my system would sometimes freeze for a few seconds, and I would be notified via pop-up that the GPU driver had crashed.  Many times my PC would crash simply by waking the monitor from sleep (the PC itself is set to never sleep).  I chocked this all up to AMD GPU driver issues, as they seem to cause issues for quite a number of people, and it was the only thing new to my system.  I would reinstall the GPU driver after these crashes, because Adrenaline software would no longer work.  I may get a day between these crashes.  More often than not, however, it was a daily event.

All of these issues have stopped since removing AMD StoreMI.  I haven't had one program crash/BSOD/system hang.  I can game without worry.  YouTube doesn't cause driver crashes.  The system wakes from sleep with no problem.  In fact, the GPU driver hasn't crashed at all.  If you're using StoreMI and experiencing system instability, I would recommend uninstalling StoreMI and seeing if the instability disappears.  This never happened with my NVIDIA GPU, causing me to believe the issues were related to the AMD GPU.

System Info:
Motherboard - MSI MPG X570 Gaming Pro Carbon WIFI
CPU - AMD Ryzen 5950X
GPU - MSI Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming X Trio
RAM - Corsair Vengeance RGB RT 32GB (CMN32GX4M4Z3600C18)
NVMe SSD - Gigabyte AORUS NVMe Gen4 SSD 1TB (PCIe 4.0 x4)
NVMe SSD - HP EX920 NVMe Gen3 SSD 1TB (PCIe 3.0 x4)
SATA SSD - SanDisk SSD Plus 240GB
HDD - Seagate BarraCuda Pro 4TB (ST4000DM006)
HDD - Western Digital WD Black 4TB (WD4005FZBX)

1 Solution
CraZ_CZ
Adept I

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I'll just add that the "Disk Not Found" issue in CrystalDiskInfo is tracked here:
https://github.com/hiyohiyo/CrystalDiskInfo/issues/81

View solution in original post

8 Replies
CraZ_CZ
Adept I

Thanks for sharing your experience.

I'll just add that the "Disk Not Found" issue in CrystalDiskInfo is tracked here:
https://github.com/hiyohiyo/CrystalDiskInfo/issues/81

I just want to also throw it out there that SeaTools5 from seagate also doesn't work post StoreMi install. 

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Oh. Can you get in touch with SeaTools5 support to see what software tinkering trickaroo had happened (basically any way to get useful logs of errors)? Maybe it will shed some light on potential issues?

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DimkaTsv
Miniboss

Why would you even need StoreMI while having 2xNVME, SSD and 2xHDD?
Sole purpose of StoreMI is to use SSD as cache for HDD. More than that, such caching is even not so much less risky than RAID configuration.

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In my case I like to speed up my large and slow HDDs in terms reading of most used files and I also like the write caching. The improvement is significant. So from my x-TB disks I can do almost SSD-like disks.

Good article about testing is here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/jcfw3g/storemi_20_comparison_benchmark_and_testing/

As Craz_CZ mentioned, it was to speed up my larger HDD.  When I didn't have any issues with StoreMI, the difference when launching a game from the SSD/HDD pair was significantly faster than when using only the HDD.  Oh, and each NVMe drive is 1TB.  2TB isn't much when you have a large game library.

CraZ_CZ
Adept I

Btw, after couple of months, I've finally "resolved" it. I got rid of NVMe-256G & HDD-2T combo, StoreMI went away and replaced it with just another larger and faster NVMe-1T (prices are very reasonable these days). I actually don't need whole 2TB drive (data I don't need to access right on my PC were moved to my Synology NAS). Older unused components (NVMe-256G & HDD-2T) were used in a budget-PC of a friend and the whole upgrade to "NVMe only" cost only a few bucks. And now I can monitor temperature and SMART on all (both) my NVMe disks.

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johnbos
Journeyman III

I just removed Store MI and all my problems disappeared. BIOS and disk manager wouldn't recognize my NVME SSD. Now, all is well though I can't used the features of StoreMI.

 

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