RAID locking drives to save power?

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Pyrophoric

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Joined
Sep 28, 2010
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Not sure what the deal is, maybe just the drives themselves, but I have run RAID 5 and just tried RAID 10 with a set of 4 Seagate 7200rpm drives and after a few minutes they all go into some sort of sleep lock where if I attempt to access data they sound like that I have power back up and put the arm back in position.

Is there a way to disable this feature? I made sure the drives dont turn off according to Windows 7 power settings but they still lock after awhile.

Mobo is a Rampage III Extreme.
 
Which specific model hard drive(s) are you using?

When did you bought them?
 
Seagate Drives

Three were bought months ago, one was bought just recently. However, in raid 5 they have been doing this since I purchased them. I thought someone was wrong with the drives at first and did an exchange on them all through Newegg, twice!

It's apparent that this is some "feature." I just wish I knew how to turn it off.
 
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software raid?
hardware raid?
what controller?

any additional hdds that aren't part of the array? do they/do they not do the same thing?
 
Hardware raid through the Rampage III Extreme noted above. Using Intel Rapid Storage, latest revision.

Intel ICH10R

On the ICH10R Sata Ports:

Port 0: Corsair F120
Port 1: LG Blu-Ray Burner
Port 2: Seagate 1TB (RAID)
Port 3: Seagate 1TB (RAID)
Port 4: Seagate 1TB (RAID)
Port 5: Seagate 1TB (RAID)

On the Marvell controller are two Seagate 7200 rpm drives (300GB and 500GB).

On the JCMicro controller is a Lite-On DVD-RW)

None of the other drives do this. Those same Seagates in RAID 10 on this machine were on RAID 5 in my old machine with an Asus P5Q Deluxe mobo and did the exact same thing. I had all the drives replaced several times thinking they were bad but it seems like this is a "feature."
 
Pyrophoric said:
Hrm, keep answering questions but no one is answering mine... lol
Click to expand...

Well you did post it in the wrong subforum: Your question is more suited for the Data Storage subforum. Ask a mod to move your thread over to that subforum.
 
Not sure about intel raid but with a lot of hardware raid controllers you can set a spindown timer to save power, maybe there is a setting in the storage manager that can change this but i doubt it

otherwise try using one of the seagates as a stand alone drive if it still does this then is a feature (unwanted or not)
 
You probably have the OS set to turn off the "drive" after a certain amount of time and the controller passes this on to the array. Did you check for this?
 
Yes, I checked to make that off. Yeah, the drives don't seem to be as noisy when slotted as single drives. That's probably just because its not waking 4 at once though.

I just updated the firmware on them all from CC38 to CC46 so I have yet to see if that will help but hopefully that will have been the problem.
 
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