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Two weeks ago, I purchased 2 of the Western Digital 640GB Black drives from the Egg with the intent of using them in a Matrix RAID array. When I received the drives, I proceeded to configure them with a 275GB RAID 1 partition on the inside track and the remainder in a RAID 0 partition (~595GB) on the outside track.
I benchmarked them and was very pleased with the results, so I copied all of my data over to them. However, I began to notice that every few days, the RAID 1 array was needing to run a data integrity verification (or something similar...I don't recall exactly what it was called), which took about an hour to run. I didn't really think anything of this because sometimes my system locks up (Windows XP...I know, big surprise) and I have to reset it. It's happened a few times when it didn't lock up though, and the only reason I could think of is that it might have to do with hibernation, since I use that frequently. I know that a dirty shutdown will trigger the integrity scan, so I just ignored it.
Cut to this past Sunday evening. I tried to hibernate the PC, as I always do, and I noticed that it was taking a very long time (2+ minutes vs. the normal 20 seconds). When I turned my system on the next day, it came up with an error stating that the RAID 1 array was in a degraded status and that one of the drives was in an "error occurred" status. The RAID 0 array was in a normal status.
I was able to boot into Windows, but it was having some difficulty doing so (freezing, etc). So when I was finally able to get to the desktop, I ran a scan on both the C and D drives (RAID 1 and 0, respectively). The scan found numerous errors on the D drive, which the RAID controller said was fine, and nothing on C, which I expected since the bad mirror was offline. After everything was repaired, I marked the bad mirror as normal and rebuilt the array. After rebooting 9 hours later, the array was once again marked as degraded and with an "error occurred" status. I ran another scan, fixed a couple more minor problems on the D drive, marked the array as normal and rebuilt it yet again.
Cut to this morning and it's still showing up as degraded and an error occurred. Now it seems to me that one of the drives probably has bad sectors on it. However, I'm confused as to why the RAID controller hasn't marked them as bad, so my first question is this. Is there a way to scan for bad sectors in a RAID array, or do I need to break the array and scan it that way? Second, assuming there are bad sectors and I am able to mark them as bad, what's to prevent this from happening again in the future? Shouldn't the RAID controller have done this when it couldn't access the data? Why would it allow me to rebuild the array 2 times over the same bad sectors?
Thanks in advance for any assistance you guys can offer!
I benchmarked them and was very pleased with the results, so I copied all of my data over to them. However, I began to notice that every few days, the RAID 1 array was needing to run a data integrity verification (or something similar...I don't recall exactly what it was called), which took about an hour to run. I didn't really think anything of this because sometimes my system locks up (Windows XP...I know, big surprise) and I have to reset it. It's happened a few times when it didn't lock up though, and the only reason I could think of is that it might have to do with hibernation, since I use that frequently. I know that a dirty shutdown will trigger the integrity scan, so I just ignored it.
Cut to this past Sunday evening. I tried to hibernate the PC, as I always do, and I noticed that it was taking a very long time (2+ minutes vs. the normal 20 seconds). When I turned my system on the next day, it came up with an error stating that the RAID 1 array was in a degraded status and that one of the drives was in an "error occurred" status. The RAID 0 array was in a normal status.
I was able to boot into Windows, but it was having some difficulty doing so (freezing, etc). So when I was finally able to get to the desktop, I ran a scan on both the C and D drives (RAID 1 and 0, respectively). The scan found numerous errors on the D drive, which the RAID controller said was fine, and nothing on C, which I expected since the bad mirror was offline. After everything was repaired, I marked the bad mirror as normal and rebuilt the array. After rebooting 9 hours later, the array was once again marked as degraded and with an "error occurred" status. I ran another scan, fixed a couple more minor problems on the D drive, marked the array as normal and rebuilt it yet again.
Cut to this morning and it's still showing up as degraded and an error occurred. Now it seems to me that one of the drives probably has bad sectors on it. However, I'm confused as to why the RAID controller hasn't marked them as bad, so my first question is this. Is there a way to scan for bad sectors in a RAID array, or do I need to break the array and scan it that way? Second, assuming there are bad sectors and I am able to mark them as bad, what's to prevent this from happening again in the future? Shouldn't the RAID controller have done this when it couldn't access the data? Why would it allow me to rebuild the array 2 times over the same bad sectors?
Thanks in advance for any assistance you guys can offer!
Thanks for the help, guys.