Raid 1 False Failure?

D

Deathwish238

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 11, 2006
Messages
313
I setup Raid 1 for one of my setups a while back. I turn it on today and the RAID controller gives a warning during boot up saying it's critical and one hdd is either disconnected or failed.

So I disconnect the second drive and boot to Windows. Then I plug in the second and disconnect the first....and boot to Windows.


Obviously, both drives are fine since I'm able to boot using either. I'm not sure where to go from here in either fixing or diagnosing the error. I tried downloading Smartmontools, but it doesn't see anything(guessing because of RAID).

I'm using an Asus mobo(think it's an M4A78) and the onboard raid controller.
 
Most likely 1 or more of the drives has uncorrectable sectors. These are sectors that were written to the drive but it can not read them anymore. When you booted you most likely did not hit any of the sectors. However with that said other problems could have occurred.
 
sounds like you have WD or Seagate drives that fall out of the array because they try to repair bad sectors. Consumer WD Black and Blue drives do this, where as TLER enabled drives [Look at WD RE- drives] don't try as long to recover bad sectors.

both drives are probably "ok" but you may continue to experience either drive falling out of the array down the road. make sure to buy drives made for RAID if you want to continue to use raid.
 
What! There are drives made for RAID? I just got these two 320GB WDs....how did I not see this anywhere -_-


So basically, one of the drives is going bad...okay...now how should I test to figure out which one it is?


I don't think I'll ever buy Western Digital again. Over the years, my failure rate with them has approached about 50%! That's absurdity!

Thanks for the responses


Edit: Looking at the RE drives, I see that they're supposed to be nicer but I don't see them saying anything about being meant for RAID

Edit Edit: So it's the TLER that WD uses to fix their otherwise broken HDDs. Fucking great. "Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) is a name used by Western Digital for a hard disk drive firmware bugfix (to a misfeature) that allows improved error handling in a RAID environment. "
 
I don't think I'll ever buy Western Digital again
Click to expand...

Seagate does the same. And Hitachi and Samsung you need to enable a raid mode.


Over the years, my failure rate with them has approached about 50%! That's absurdity!
Click to expand...

No matter what brand you buy the current expectation is 2 to 8% of all SATA drives will fail each year for the 5 years of service life that SATA drives have. After 5 years the failure rate will even be higher.


http://labs.google.com/papers/disk_failures.pdf

see page 4 figure 2.
 
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lol 8%. I bought 4 640GB and 2 320GB within the last couple years. 3 are dead. That's a flat 50%. Before that I owned 3 other WDs and 1 died as well. So what that's 4/9. And it's not like it's just me using all these....fives systems in three households. Only the 2 320s were in RAID, everything else was standard. Not even talking about 5 years of service...all drives were less than 2 years old. I know all HDDs eventually fail, but this is stupid.
 
Where do you buy them from? I don't buy drives from newegg anymore. I either pick them up from microcenter [hopefully in a retail box] or I buy them from amazon.com or dell small business.

Newegg doesn't *ship* new drives in packaging you can RMA broken drives to seagate or WD. The packaging standard there isn't really up to snuff.
 
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