It is a funny problem!
Before installing 12.9, I uninstalled version 13.2 of the RST software using Windows Add/Remove programs. The uninstaller warned me that the drivers would not be removed if they were currently in use. When I installed version 12.9 of RST there was a warning that newer drivers were already installed but I selected the option to replace the version 13.2 drivers with the older 12.9 drivers. I used Device Manager to verify that the version 12.9 drivers were installed correctly (see attached screenshot).
My motherboard manufacturer (Gigabyte) offers a download of version 12.8.0.1016 of Intel RST for my board. I tried downgrading to their version using the same method outlined in the above paragraph but it did not fix the problem so I have upgraded back to 12.9 again.
Gigabyte also offers one newer version of the Award BIOS than I am currently using but the changelog only lists improved USB3.0 support -- nothing about the RAID ROM. There is also a newer UEFI BIOS but I have had problems with it in the past. Here is the product page for my board.
It is odd that RST seems to work fine for my 150GB SSD and for my ancient 150GB HDD but not for the 1.8TB drive. The main differences I've noticed are:
- The 1.8TB drive is GPT partitioned whereas the others are MBR
- The 1.8 TB drive is being used by Windows for the pagefile
I have searched online and it doesn't seem like these differences should matter but maybe you know about something I couldn't find?
My 1.8TB harddrive seems to be operating perfectly fine. I have been using it this whole time and not had any errors. Just in case, I tried running SeaTools to check the drive for errors but apparently SeaTools only runs in IDE mode (or, in any case, it crashes iaStora.sys with a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error when I try to run it).