HDD IN RAID - WHICH IS BROKEN?

[Greebo]

I have two samsung 750gb in raid, one brand new and one old.

I put them together in raid 0 and tried an hd tune run to see how they performed.

There were massive dips dropping to 0.7mb/sec transfer with the norm being 170mb/sec.

This raid array is split into two partitions, 250gb for the system and 1.25tb for data.

I run an error check on the date partition and it came up with 12 damaged sectors.

Now under raid I don't appear to be able to get smart/health info for the drives. Before I got the new one, my old drive was perfect.

How can I tell which drive is faulty without spliting the raid up? It might be in taking the old one out and putting it back in that my old drive has become faulty or it might be the new drive.

Or could it be neither drive and there is a problem with my new mobo?

 

[gurusan]

AFAIK you can't view smart data while in RAID.

Try unplugging one of the drives and booting in IDE mode and using some sort of utility like hitachi feature tool to view smart info.

 

[Greebo]

I thought that might be the answer. Problem is that these are my only 2 hard drives now, I sold my old 2 at the weekend

Any suggestions how I can boot to get some smart info without a bootable hard drive? Is this doable with a bootable usb stick or something else?

I do I need to borrow a hard drive from somebody?

Also, if I do, will I lose the data on my raid array if I split them up?

Sorry for the noob questions, hard drives aren't really my thing.

 

[wonko]

You really need to do a backup before going any further.
Samsung's ESTOOL is possibly what you need - http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/utilities/ES_Tool.html. You'd have to put it on a bootable floppy/cd/usb pen drive and boot from that instead of your raid array. I'm not familiar with your mobo but you may have to move the disks onto sata ports not used for the raid array.
I can't remember if estool shows you all the raw smart data, but it will do diagnostics and tell you if the drives are healthy or not.
Good luck!

 

[Greebo]

Cheers for that. I will try that tonight post backup.

I can see my works external hard drive getting borrowed tonight

I can either move my hard drives to other slots or just deselect raid in bios and it then see them as a single hard drive again so that bit is easy.

I am dam annoyed. Never had a hard drive problem and I will be even more annoyed if it turns out to be the new hard drive.