Degraded RAID1 - Help!

rhysduck · 29 Dec 2009 at 10:26

Morning,

Have setup a RAID1 consisting of 2x WD Caviar Blacks. Turned my pc on one morning over the festive period and Raid Configuration Utility is showing the RAID as "DEGRADED"... It gives "ERROR OCCURED" as a STATUS for one of the WD drives...

I can't find out more about the ERROR OCCURED error via the RAID Utility on the motherboard.. Whats the next step? Both drives are more or less brand new...

Im at work at the moment - is the best bet to try and boot off the "faulty" drive with the working one unplugged? :confused:

I didn't want to create a new array to see if it worked as it said all data would be lost on the recoery volume - I was a bit confused so didn't bother with that... just incase

neil_g · 29 Dec 2009 at 10:50

one disk in your mirror is either dead or dying. best bet is to figure out which one it is and swap it out ASAP.

Durzel · 29 Dec 2009 at 14:20

Next step logically is to RMA the knackered drive and hope the other one doesn't die before you get it back and plug it back in.

rhysduck · 30 Dec 2009 at 10:45

I've informed the seller of my hdd's that one is faulty and described the problem to them... Awaiting to hear back from them to see whats what. They did come from Germany though.

Digital · 30 Dec 2009 at 14:05

I had this trouble with Samsung drives, both F1 and F3, in the end I sacked it and stuck with an SSD and left everything as single drives. So far all good.

Dunno whether is was the on-board raid controller or the drives themselves, but it was way more hassle than it was worth.

rhysduck · 30 Dec 2009 at 14:07

Were your drives actually dead or just not liking the RAID setup?

I cant push to the cost of SSDs in RAID at the moment.

Hodders · 30 Dec 2009 at 14:13

You might want to check if the drives you are using have timing issues when being used as a raid pair. I know that I had issues using non RE (raid edition) drives on an ICH9R controller.

You can sometimes get firmware tools to optimise the timings and solve this.

rhysduck · 30 Dec 2009 at 14:24

Hodders said:
You might want to check if the drives you are using have timing issues when being used as a raid pair. I know that I had issues using non RE (raid edition) drives on an ICH9R controller.

How do I go about doing that? :confused:

New to me. :confused:

You said:
You can sometimes get firmware tools to optimise the timings and solve this.

- I'll see what google throws up.

rhysduck · 4 Jan 2010 at 10:35

Well now the drive is working again... RAID is healthy and appears to be working.
Do I still send the drive back? (They wont exchange it straight out - they will send it bck to WD for checks) (So maybe not worth it?)
Or should I keep the drive as it now appears to be working? ???

audiolab · 4 Jan 2010 at 16:43

I would back everything up and stress test it for 24 hours at least. If there is a failure try to surface it so it is permenant. Intermittent failures are a real pain.

DIABLO · 4 Jan 2010 at 19:37

Reset the alert in the Matrix driver software and go about your normaL business and see if you get the error again. Sometimes the RAID controller can get a bit flaky and flag a eror for no reason.