Areca 1220 Raid Drive Failure

Hi everyone,

I inherited a server using an areca 1220 raid array of 8 drives. I didnt set up the server and Im no expert with raid so I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction:

Recently one of the drives failed and I ended up with a degraded array. When viewing the raid set information, instead of one set I had 2:

1 set showed drives: 1,2,3,4,x,6,7,8
the other showed: - - - - 5 - - -

I shut down the system and pulled what i thought was the correct hard drive. Turns out it wasnt channel 5, but channel 2. I later found out that instead of the drives being organized in the tray like:
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8

they are organized like:
1 5 7 4
2 6 8 3

Anyways, I put drive 2 back in, and rebooted the system to attempt to find drive 5 but when the system entered the BIOS and I checked the RAID set it still showed channel 5 as degraded, but channel 3 was completely missing:
1 set showed drives: 1,2,-,4,x,6,7,8
the other showed: - - - - 5 - - -

Now, if I replace channel 5 with a new blank drive I see that channel 5 shows a Free drive, but 3 is still missing.

If I put the channel 3 drive in channel 5 I get 1 raid set:
1,2,-,4,3,6,7,8

But if I put a blank drive in channel 3 no matter which drive is placed in channel 5, it takes about 5 minutes to load the BIOS and shows the drive as Failed.

Did I royally screw something up some how? is the RAID card going? or am I just missing something.

Thank you for any help

Couple things to start with:

First, what type of RAID is the array set in? RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, 0 + 1, 6....etc

Also, I would get a known good drive and place it into the slot which says it has the bad drive. Make sure that the plug (SATA/SAS) port isnt whats wrong/broken.

If its still reads bad drive then you most likely have a bad adapter on that slot.

Hope this helps.

Hi, thank you for the reply.

It is RAID 6, which I believe should still work with 2 drives down. I wouldnt be surprised if the adapter is bad. Everything that I checked today seems to be pointing that way. Luckily this is a backup server so if I mess something up, its not too bad.

I dont see a menu option for rebuilding the array in the raid bios. All I can see to try is creating a hot spare.

Would I run into trouble if I just created a hot spare booted the system and backed up everything I needed, then just replaced all of the drives? (The system is getting old and I have 10 new spare HDDs that I could use anyways)

by the way depending on what raid you have yes changing the drive to another channel can get error readings because for example in raid 5 theres usually a parity drive and portions of the array on seperate disks and until you get another drive and recover the lost material i believe youll get an error but the drive failed coud be how this manufacturer says its getting an error.

I think what needs to be done is that you need to recover the lost drive info. I would call areca and look up info on which raid was used. RAID 5 is popular so it could have been this. I am sure the manuyfacturer could give you better info.

if you go to this website:

http://www.acnc.com/raidedu/5

it gives you a graphic on how raid 5 is done and you can also learn about other raid as well.

The key thing is though since you have an areca id look @ their site first since it is their controllers and device. See if you can loook in their forums and etc.

also the page for raid 6 explanation:

http://www.acnc.com/raidedu/6

by the way im sorta jealous.....raid array's are awesome especially if your using for home stuff.

with space seruously coming @ a premium i believe its just a matter of time before homes start having terabytes of data for everything from home videos to photos and movies, games and etc.

my personal computer has 8 TB of storage with 2 x ssd's in raid 0 for performance.

there are some raid arrays that can still function when a whole drive is missing.

I think i saw someone watching a movie off a some riad array i cant remember what kind (i think it was an infrant which is now netgear) and they pulled a drive out and the movie was still going.