Raid 1 degraded issues

NickOw

NickOw

NickOw

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1 Aug 2006
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Hey guys. I recently had a raid 0 setup fail on me but decided to buy a couple of 1 tb drives and setup as raid 1. everythings been going fine for about a week when suddenly the pc locked up and needed a hard reset - on boot the raid bios said one of the hdd had failed and the raid 1 was degraded! Not good at all.

This is twice that the raid has failed - could this really be a HDD issue or possibly a raid controller issue or just something else? Sorry I didnt know which forum to best post this in but as its the HDD failing I came here.

My setup has been fine for a couple of years now, no issues with the raid 0 setup until last week when it went down, and now the new raid 1.

I have an asus p5q deluxe mb that I am using the intel raid controller on - i setup the raid array in bios before installing Win7 and as I said all has been fine for a week. Cables are all ok - am worried the mb is going?

Any advice would as always be appreciated

Cheers
 
Lockups and crashes can lead to sectors being marked as bad that actually aren't. This of course screws up RAID arrays but with a redundant array you can use the manufacturers tool on the drive and if the sector isn't actually bad you'll be okay to use the disk again and rebuild the array.
 
Thanks. I grabbed the samsung estool to boot and test the drives. They are two x 1 tb samsung f3 drives. One is fine but the other caused issues with the surface scan at about 94.5% complete. Needed a reboot to test again. Seems I need to rma one of the discs as only brought 7 days ago

Could anything with the mb raid controller cause hdds to die. Am just worried something is causing the drive to die. Paranoid I suppose lol never had samsungs hdd due on me
 
Unlikely, but disks tend to either break when they're brand new or die of old age. I had a WD that just stopped dead after a few weeks. I think I could read about 0.01% of the data on it.

RMA it and get another.

That said, it's also true that lock-ups and power failures can break a RAID array. It isn't a case of marking sectors as bad - rather it's that a write was half-complete (e.g. written to one disk but not the other), so the array is now inconsistent.
 
cheers for that, kinda puts my mind at ease that the mb will still be ok, I will RMA the defective drive asap.

In terms of broken RAID 1 arrays due to lockups/power loss is there any way to restore it without recreating and loosing everything. The raid bios on my mb (p5q deluxe) just had create/delete or exit array, nothing more, and the intel raid software for windows just reported an error, didnt have an option to restore. Should I invest in some good software for RAID recovery?
 
It's called a 'rebuild'. Whether you have the option for rebuilding an array is up to the software. You should in theory be able to delete a RAID 1 array and re-create it, and even create a RAID 1 array with data on one disk, but I make absolutely no promises (I've done it, but it depends on the software and it depends on knowing with 100% certainty which disk is which :)).
 
ah thanks. I know which is which hd wise, as the faulty one is currently out of the machine. In theory I should be able to put the replacement in and rebuild the array? Will see what happens , cheers :D
 
Berserker said:
Unlikely, but disks tend to either break when they're brand new or die of old age. I had a WD that just stopped dead after a few weeks. I think I could read about 0.01% of the data on it.

RMA it and get another.

That said, it's also true that lock-ups and power failures can break a RAID array. It isn't a case of marking sectors as bad - rather it's that a write was half-complete (e.g. written to one disk but not the other), so the array is now inconsistent.
Click to expand...

It's both. A failed write can cause the drives firmware to mark off the sector beyond issues with the array itself.
 
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