new Raid 1 = Degraded?

[MrGuvernment]

Hello,

I just put together a raid 1 system for a test bed, nothing fancy

i am using 2 seagate 7200.10 250g drives and an Adaptec 1420SA SATA II raid card.

i know is not the best but for what i need and my budget it sounded good.

Anyways, i put in th 2 drives, made a new raid 1 in the adaptec bios, did a "build" of the array, rebooted the system and all was fine.

i turn the system off, boot it up not too long ago and it tells me the raid 1 is degraded?

i removed the raid 1 array and just hooked up the drives as solo drives, formated and check disk each one and each one passed fine.

So curious as to why the adaptec card is reporting the array as degraded when no data was even written to the drives?

when the array was made, i went into windows made a simple volume and formated, thas was all?


Is this just the result of using a $100 raid card?


I have 4 drives total and plan to run 2 raid 1 arrays (this will be for a new exchange server) So i want to make sure this card isnt just crapping out.....


[EDIT] Does anyone know, as i cant locate, if this raid card supports the ability when reading from a drive it can pull data from all drives? i recall reading now all raid cards support this feature and that some raid cards will primarly only read data from one given drive?

 

[MrGuvernment]

well, i just redid the array, same drives, and so far is shows as good in the boot sequence, let hope it does


But would anyone have any idea why it showed degraded before? maybe just a bad raid was created?

 

[unhappy_mage]

It may have just started building the array and not finished before. How long did it take to initialize?

 

[MrGuvernment]

to build the array i took hours, i went to bed and woke up it was done, it took about, 6 hours to build again last night

to boot from a cold boot and find the array takes like 4-5 seconds maybe, pretty fast

now it says to "verify" everytime i reboot, it seems to want to sat something diff.