Gigabyte UD5 Mobo or Raid 5 problem?

GiB · 27 Aug 2009 at 16:48

I have a gigabyte UD5 and a raid 5 array with 4 1TB Samsung drives (HD103UJ)'s

Setup with 300gb raid 0 and the rest raid 5.

When in windows I can browse the internet for a bit and then the machine locks up. The only way to resolve this is by a reset. Then when it boots back up it needs to rebuild the array. 48hours later the array rebuilds and I can go about my business for 5 -30 mins then it locks up again, need to restart and the raid rebuilds itself again. This only happens on the raid 5. The computer never locks up or needs restarting when rebuilding. Does struggle if i do stuff on it ie unrar files etc. so its best left alone. Well its spent the best part of a week and a half rebuilding and crashing so I m getting a little miffed. The south bridge is roasting on the mobo, should it be too hot to touch on these boards? Is it being overworked or is the mobo faulty? Has made a slight high pitch noise but I solved that by turning of one of the power saving features in the bios. So any ideas guys?

Its not the same hard drive that fails either? Going to run some hd tests but i think the drives are fine plus will prob take me yonks to test them.

Cheers

GiB · 27 Aug 2009 at 18:22

Quick update looks like two drives do not have the same settings

AAM not set in two of them set to FAST on the other 2
SMART not set on 2 either

Nice of samsung to put different default settings on them.

Not sure if either of these will do the trick but fingers crossed.

GiB · 30 Aug 2009 at 10:04

Well they broke again this morning and the best of it is two drives in the raid 5 broke, and cannot be rebuild but the raid 0 is fine???? if it were a faulty drive or cable or something then surley the raid 0 would be broken?

Anyone have any ideas?

Motherboard? Is the setup of both raid 0 & 5 too ill advised?

Cheers.

miniyazz · 30 Aug 2009 at 22:34

RAID 5 with integrated controller is never going to be the best, you could really do with a dedicated RAID 5 card, the PERC 5/i for example. I don't know what hardware the southbridge heatsink is cooling, but if there's any sort of processor, it'll be getting severely stressed by the XOR calculations needed to write to/rebuild the RAID 5 array.

Personally I wouldn't bother with RAID5 unless you get a dedicated controller. Not sure if that's the main issue of course.