Intel Rapid Storage Technology RAID reliabilty and swapping motherboards question

[Chris Wilson]

My Gigabyte Z97X GAMING 3 motherboard is currently using the BIOS Intel Rapid Storage stuff to run two identical SATA III D drives in RAID1. The OS and applications are on an SSD C Drive. My far more knowledgeable friends think BIOS RAID is flaky and I might have issues reading these drives if I have to change the motherboard for any reason. I do not expect RAID to be a substitute for good back up policies, but do expect a painless rebuild should a drive fail. I am asking if anyone has real world experience on the following please?

If a drive in the RAID1 pairing dies does this technology inform me immediately somehow? Or only when the OS (Windows 7 64 bit Pro) is rebooted?

Have you experienced any issues with adding a replacement RAID 1 SATA drive and it not rebuilding itself flawlessly?

Any issues with a dead or dying drive taking down the info on the good drive?

Any issues finding current motherboards that will just read the original RAID1 pairing as built by the original board, using Intel Rapid Storage BIOS RAID1?

If there are gotchas I'd bite the bullet and buy a "proper" Adaptec PCIe RAID card and run hardware RAID. I can do without nasty surprises I have yet to experience a failure of a RAID drive, maybe I should try and test this setup somehow, any safe and simple ways of doing this?


Thanks for any replies!

 

[Steampunk]

My Gigabyte Z97X GAMING 3 motherboard is currently using the BIOS Intel Rapid Storage stuff to run two identical SATA III D drives in RAID1. The OS and applications are on an SSD C Drive. My far more knowledgeable friends think BIOS RAID is flaky and I might have issues reading these drives if I have to change the motherboard for any reason. I do not expect RAID to be a substitute for good back up policies, but do expect a painless rebuild should a drive fail. I am asking if anyone has real world experience on the following please?

If a drive in the RAID1 pairing dies does this technology inform me immediately somehow? Or only when the OS (Windows 7 64 bit Pro) is rebooted?

You'll get a warning from the Intel RST application that a drive had dropped out of the array. You'll also get warnings at boot time from the RST BIOS and again when windows boots. There's nothing stopping you from running any other disk monitoring software as long as it knows how to talk to RAID arrays (I use Hard Disk Sentinel which gives more granulated info that wouldn't trigger SMART warnings).

Have you experienced any issues with adding a replacement RAID 1 SATA drive and it not rebuilding itself flawlessly?

Nope. RAID 1 just copies from one drive to the new one.

Any issues with a dead or dying drive taking down the info on the good drive?

Nope, unless you've got a subtly faulty drive corrupting info that then gets copied to the second drive. I'd say you're more likely to get filesystem corruption copied about rather than hard drive issues, as the drive hardware tries to remap bad blocks when it sees an issue at the hardware level. If you get something like a bad shutdown/crash, RST will just revalidate the drive.

Any issues finding current motherboards that will just read the original RAID1 pairing as built by the original board, using Intel Rapid Storage BIOS RAID1?

Intel RST BIOSes are different, but there does seem to be a lot of backwards compatibility. Several times, I've broken a RAID 1 mirror, put the drive in a new machine, booted, then built a new RAID 1. At worst, you might have to rewrite the boot sector with bootsect.exe, but that only takes a few seconds from a installation disk.

If there are gotchas I'd bite the bullet and buy a "proper" Adaptec PCIe RAID card and run hardware RAID. I can do without nasty surprises I have yet to experience a failure of a RAID drive, maybe I should try and test this setup somehow, any safe and simple ways of doing this?

Thanks for any replies!

Take a full backup, unplug a drive and see what happens? I've used this kind of RAID 1 on several machines for 5+ years, and had very little problem at the hardware levels. When drives have failed (looking at you Seagate), they've just been replaced and the mirror remade. RAID 1 is generally pretty simple, as you have two full copies of your drive. It's not like RAID 0 where one drive can fail and take out the info on the second one.

The biggest problem I've ever had was a filesystem error where a BIOS upgrade and then a subsequent boot with ACHI drivers instead of RAID drivers threw up a load of diskchk activity that ended up taking a long time to sort out, but that sort of thing happens above the level of the RAID/drive hardware.

If you're just using RAID 1 for a couple of drives, then the onboard stuff is perfectly adequate, and gives you all kinds of useful options (such as using a SSD as a cache for a RAID array). If you need high performance or are doing things like RAID 5, then I'd start looking at separate adaptors, but they're expensive and have their own issues and gotchas to deal with.

 

[Chris Wilson]

Thank you sincerely for that most comprehensive reply! It has cleared up most all of my issues and I feel I have a better understanding of things now. I had a current backup of my RAID1 D drive pairing so I just pulled the data cable off one of them. The task bar Intel icon started flashing, and I also received an e-mail to say there was a drive failure, as I had set up e-mail reports. I powered down, and re connected the drive. I was somewhat surprised to see the RAID starting to be rebuilt, and it's still at it (78% finished) over an hour later. I was sure no D drive read / writes would be occurring when I pulled the cable, I half expected it to just find the other half of the mirror and not do anything like a rebuild, still it will be a valid test.


Thanks again for your time typing all that up for me Steampunk

 

[Steampunk]

Thank you sincerely for that most comprehensive reply! It has cleared up most all of my issues and I feel I have a better understanding of things now. I had a current backup of my RAID1 D drive pairing so I just pulled the data cable off one of them. The task bar Intel icon started flashing, and I also received an e-mail to say there was a drive failure, as I had set up e-mail reports. I powered down, and re connected the drive. I was somewhat surprised to see the RAID starting to be rebuilt, and it's still at it (78% finished) over an hour later. I was sure no D drive read / writes would be occurring when I pulled the cable, I half expected it to just find the other half of the mirror and not do anything like a rebuild, still it will be a valid test.

The fact that you unplugged the drive and then rebooted means the mirror is broken and the two drives are now different if anything changes on the drive that is still live. I'm not sure it what circumstances it does a rebuild verses a verify. I'd a expect a crash that triggers a "filesystem incorrectly shut down" error is likely to just cause a verify, where dropping a drive will cause a rebuild.

There is also some kind of journaling going on, as I've seen cache rebuilds happen at boot time after a bad crash, that then don't trigger a verify.

You can minimise problems in the event of a crash by choosing what kind of caching you use, how Windows and RST flushes caches, etc. Though if you have an unstable system, I'd recommend fixing that unless you want your RAID to be constantly fixing itself. Crashing/improper shutdowns/ filesystem errors are a nightmare when RAID is involved. A stable system makes those problems not happen in the first place.

Thanks again for your time typing all that up for me Steampunk

No probs - I can touch type!

 

[mahius]

I had all the same questions, so it's nice to see them being answered. Going forward I won't use mechanical HDDs without RAID1, my WD Scorpio Black died recently and it's supposed to be a great drive. The warranty on it even goes until 2017. Thanks.