RAID0 giving errors, options available inside

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stiltner

[H]F Junkie
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Mar 16, 2000
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Ok, so drive #2 in my RAID0 has issued failures. I reset it as some others stated that doing so resulted in fine operation and the message never returned.

Less than 24 hours pass, and its errored again. It's the 750GB Blacks in my sig. I have a 2TB Black also that I was prepping to install.

Options I'm considering: Backup, and move data to the 2TB drive, axing RAID0, and using the 750GB's as NAS storage.

Replace the dying 750GB, and restore the data

Image the drives, and move to a pair of 2TB drives in RAID0/1 instead.

Chance it and hope it doesn't die

*I have backup systems I can use in the meantime for downtime, but this is my gaming rig, so I'd be without funtime if I waited on a replacement drive*
 
This is why I've always avoided using RAID. It seems that troubleshooting problems would really be a hassle, lol. You might want to try the "Data Storage Systems" forum and it has a lot more views and seems to have a lot of guys that do that kind of thing.
 
Some say yes, some say no. Frankly, I think its just the race to 1TB drives that has caused a lot of issues as of late. It seems the mfg's are more interested in telling you about the size, than the performance. Similar to Genmay discussions.

The writes to the drives are technically cut in 1/2, since 1/2 the data is stored on each partition, effectively doubling read/write speeds.
 
A quick followup to this. I thought about it, and I realized something.

In an effort to clean up my boot times. I installed Soluto a few days prior
to these errors starting to show.

I removed Soluto, and reset the flag on the drive. Previously when I would reboot, it would reflag on boot, and I'd get all kinds of problems.

Since I did the above, through patches, 2-3 reboots, no more flag, no more issues. I think Soluto was tagging something in my startup for "optimization" and that was throwing the flag to the controller because it was muckin with timings and causing the RAID to act funky.

Yes I know this all sounds very odd, but I never had a single issue with the drives prior to that software, and I haven't had the issue since removing it.

Coincidence, possibly, but I'll take that as a lesson learned.

-1 for Soluto as of right now
 
Yeah automated optimization programs can do more harm than good. It's better to make changes yourself.
 
griffinhart said:
It doesn't make a HDD more likely to fail, but it does double the point of failures making it more likely to have problems.
Click to expand...

and doubles the problems when you have a failed drive. If you were to have a drive fail in raid 0, you will have problems pulling data off of the drive. The rebuilding process is a pain.

I'd vote for anything, but raid 0.
 
and you didn't have a backup in the first place... because....
 
Stoly said:
and you didn't have a backup in the first place... because....
Click to expand...

Technically I do. I offloaded things to the server, it has 1TB of storage and 890GB free. So, the stuff I did / do need, is moved already.

Regardless. Problem has not come back, chalk this one up to shit software :)
 
I also avoid RAID0 like the plague, actually have my main OS in RAID1 which backs up onto a RAID5 array (quality hardware based card), which also has vital info backed up to Carbonite Online Data Storage, but I'm a bit anal with my datas. :D
 
I setup a temporary RAID0 configuration about 6 months ago. I had a bi-weekly backup scheduled to back everything up to a separate internal drive just in case anything went wrong - and for good reason: one of the drives I used in the array had already showed a few early symptoms of "I'm probably gonna die this year" prior to setting up RAID. It lasted a good 4 months before things started to go south. Sure enough, the hard drive died and my RAID0 array was useless. Thank goodness for backups!

In any case, I don't see a point to using RAID0. I didn't personally experience any noticeable speed increases (albeit no slow downs or anything, either) , and no improvements in benchmarks over a single drive setup. I suppose that if you wanted to "feel" like you had a cooler setup or something and you had a good backup schedule in place and dependable drives then it would work out fine for you. No better than a single drive setup, though - plus the fact that there's always the off chance you'd loose all your data from only one drive failing.
 
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