can a failing hdd do this?

footman · 18 Apr 2007 at 22:02

Ive got 3 sata drives arranged as JBOD. The OS is installed on the main WD 500gb drive and the others are just for backup.

One of the drives (the Maxtor...surprise surprise) has started behaving oddly today. If I try to access a folder on that drive it either becomes unresponsive or locks the system.

The main thing is that my Windows XP is acting up now, eg if I try to access the programs I have installed in Control Panel it stays blank. If the Maxtor drive is failing could it screw up my Windows behavior?

Also twice today the system has failed to boot into Windows. I get a bios message that the overclock has failed but if I enter setup and exit immediately with saving it boots OK.

rpstewart · 18 Apr 2007 at 22:33

So you have 3 HDDs plus the WD drive or is the WD part of the JBOD setup?

footman · 18 Apr 2007 at 22:46

I have 3 drives in total. Just to see what would would happen, I unplugged the maxtor drive and hey presto got my Add /Remove programs back!

I'd still like to know how a failing hdd would affect the OS operation if that OS was installed on a different drive.

rpstewart · 18 Apr 2007 at 23:08

If you're running a JBOD array then you can't tell what drive any file is actually stored on, Windows will spread files all over the partition that it's installed on so it's quite possible that a number of the OS files were on the Maxtor drive.

footman · 19 Apr 2007 at 07:05

rpstewart said:
If you're running a JBOD array then you can't tell what drive any file is actually stored on, Windows will spread files all over the partition that it's installed on so it's quite possible that a number of the OS files were on the Maxtor drive.

then I must be using the wrong term, JBOD is not what I'm running then. I seem to have seen the term "concatenation" coming up...I'm now reading up on this.

What would be the best way then to organise my system?. Ive just bought another 500gb disk. Its a Seagate so not the same as my WD drive.That also leaves me with another spare 150gb Seagate drive sitting in the system. ABOAM might seem more appropriate (A Bit Of A Mess) :confused:

rpstewart · 19 Apr 2007 at 08:54

How are your drives currently configured in Disk Management? If it's reporting more than one physical disk then you aren't running JBOD.

Unless you specifically want the speed or redundancy offered by the various RAID levels then I'd just use the drives individually.

Trippynet · 19 Apr 2007 at 10:31

You're not confusing JBOD and Concatenated arrays are you? (see the HD sticky). JBOD uses a RAID controller, but just makes each drive show up individually with its own drive letter. A Concatenated array uses the RAID controller to tie all the HDs together to make one big disk but without any striping or redundancy. Hence with JBOD, everything behaves pretty much the same as if it were on a standard SATA controller and the failure of a none-system drive shouldn't affect the OS's files.

Saying that, XP can behave in all manner of ways if a disk fails. When one of the two drives in my mirrored RAID on my old PC started dying (data drives, not holding the OS), XP had some awful freezes and other such behaviour until I'd unplugged the offending drive.

rpstewart · 19 Apr 2007 at 10:52

Trippynet said:
You're not confusing JBOD and Concatenated arrays are you? (see the HD sticky). JBOD uses a RAID controller, but just makes each drive show up individually with its own drive letter. A Concatenated array uses the RAID controller to tie all the HDs together to make one big disk but without any striping or redundancy. Hence with JBOD, everything behaves pretty much the same as if it were on a standard SATA controller and the failure of a none-system drive shouldn't affect the OS's files.

I'm not convinced the sticky is correct. Everything I can see (other than the sticky) says that JBOD and a Concatenated array are one and the same thing.

footman · 19 Apr 2007 at 11:27

rpstewart said:
I'm not convinced the sticky is correct. Everything I can see (other than the sticky) says that JBOD and a Concatenated array are one and the same thing.

thats the way I interpreted it. In my setup I had 2 drives in concatenation, the 500gb WD drive with the OS and the 150 GB Seagate drive used for backup.

These 2 drives were seen in BIOS. The Maxtor drive that has failed was not seen in BIOS but was seen in Windows.

My main concern is efficient backup and to that end I want to put my new 500gb Seagate in RAID1 with my existing WD drive and have the 150gb Seagate as storage for video files etc. Does this seem reasonable?

Trippynet · 19 Apr 2007 at 12:25

Hmm, I see what you mean. Plenty of other places seem to infer that JBOD is indeed just another name for a concatenated array.

In which case, it's likely that the OS's files are all towards the start of the array, but some could have ended up on another disk. Some sites I've seen say that on some controllers, the entire array can be lost if one disk pops. Not great!