The curious case of the dissapearing RAID disks

[PlumpMonkey]

I have a Gigabyte EX58-UD5 motherboard and 4 HDDs connected to it.

I have two WD Raptors connected in RAID-1 config connected to two of the 4 Gigabyte controller ports. I have my main Windows boot install on these disks

I then also have a couple of Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB disks connected in RAID 1 config connected to the other two ports. I have all my data and programs installed to these disks.

This all seems to work fine generally, but randomly my computer will seize up and BSOD for various reasons. When I reset the PC, the Spinpoint disk RAID array is not detected at the POST screen and Windows will come up with no access to those disks

I think what is happening is that the disks just "dissapear" which causes windows to crash as it suddenly cant access the program directories that I was using.

The disks remain *gone* until I fully power cycle the PC. At this point the disk/array is detected during POST again and all is fine for a few more days or weeks.

I can reset the PC as much as I like when its like this and it doesnt make any difference to re detecting the array. I actually have to fully power off and then back on again to fix it.

The thing that confuses me is that both disks disappear at the same time. If it was the HDD controller going south I would have expected one disk to be found during POST and the array to come up in a degraded state.

Also if it was the controller that was bad, I would have expected to have experienced this on the first array with the Raptor disks too.

Does anyone have any idea as to whats going on with this? I have probably experienced this about 20+ times over the last 4 or 5 months now.

 

[rpstewart]

My first thought would be to move at least the Samsung array (but probably the WD array as well) away from the Gigabyte controller and onto the Intel controller. The four Gigabyte ports are provided by two distinct controllers so it's possible one of them is iffy.

Having said that I fully appreciate that moving an array isn't going to be easy although I think the Intel controller supports RAID level migration so you could break the Samsung array, move one drive to the Intel controller, copy all the data to the drive on the Intel controller then migrate that drive into a RAID1 array using the other drive. Alternatively (and probably preferably) you could invest in another disk (if you don't have one) and back everything up before recreating the array.

 

[Nick1881]

I had a raid array on a UD5 and it would randomly tell me 1 of the drives was failing. I never got to the bottom of it but switched to a single SSD and eventually got rid of the UD5.

Sorry that doesn't help you much.

 

[PlumpMonkey]

I was worried someone was going to say move the array onto the other controller

I was looking in the manual for the docs on the Intel controller and dont see anything about how to migrate an array. Theres just a section on "create volume" that shows that the raid disks will be wiped when I create the array which is not what im after!

I think that leaves me with backing up the disks to image file on another disk, move the disks to the Intel controller, and then restore the image...

 

[ejr22]

Apparently the GSATA ports work in pairs so could you just confirm that you have the drives connected as per the below configuration:

(I'm sure you have because neither of the RAID arrays should be functioning at all if they weren't)

If you have got them connected correctly then I would suggest reading pages 61-63 & 97-106 from the manual (it's a 10MB .pdf so might take a while to load).

Also, if you are using any right-angled SATA cables, try making sure that it is the angled end that is connected to the HDD:

You never know....

Hope this helps.