RocketRAID 4320 Drive Constantly Failing

A

asty

Weaksauce
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Jun 6, 2006
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I have a RocketRAID 4320 in RAID-6 with 7 2tb hard drives (10 tb space). Sometime in late June or early July I had my first drive fail (Hitachi). I ordered a 2TB Samsung drive to replace it which died approximately 2 weeks later. That was returned to Newegg for another 2TB Samsung drive which died approximately 3 weeks after that. That drive was replaced by a 2TB WD which died approximately 1 week later (last night).

Each time the drive just appears in RAID manager as "offline". As soon as it is replaced everything functions normally for awhile until the drive fails. It's always the same position in the RAID array that fails though, so I have little way of knowing (AFAIK) if the issue is being caused by me having the worst stretch of luck ever with hard drives or if my RAID card is having issues (or maybe something different entirely, a power issue?)

Despite having 10 tb of space I don't know what the hell I'm doing when it comes to this raid array. It was easy to set up over 2 years ago but now that I'm having problems I find the documentation and support to be garbage. How can I know if these issues relate to bad luck with what drives I've been receiving or if it's related to a RAID card problem. And if the issue is anything but bad luck, what can I do to correct it? Thank you
 
Is the drive really dieing or just being kicked out of the array? Did you check the SMART on any of the drives that were kicked out? Even if the controller does not pass that along you could just connect it to a regular SATA port and look with CrystalDiskInfo.
 
If you are running Hardware RAID6, make sure to get a drive which is known to deal well with hardware raid cards. If you are looking for something inexpensive, I would go with (In 2TB) either the WD Red or a Hitachi 5k/7k (If you can find them). Are these directly hooked to the card or do you have them in a backplane? It is always possible that you got 3 drives that don't play well with this particular controller, but I would change the power and SATA cables (if directly connected) or backplane port and see if that makes a difference.
As drescherjm said you should check the SMART info on the drives, but from what you said (you put the same drive back, and it worked for a bit and then dropped out again) it is likely the replacement drives you got don't play nicely with the RocketRAID you have (The Areca cards play nicely with a wider variety of drives in HW RAID)
 
How much airflow do you have over the RAID controller? Are you replacing the drive in the same hot swap bay?
 
If using RAID controllers from HighPoint tech - rocket raid 2720 http://www.highpoint-tech.com/ (or other raid controllers) and large hard drives, 1 terabyte, 2 TB or 3 TB from Seagate or Western Digital can experience problems that raid 5 crash if one of the disks just fall out and are offline. There is no smart error tracking. It may be different drives every time and there is nothing wrong with the disks.

What you must do first as a good rule is to upgrade the firmware on hard drives, the raid controller and the latest raid drivers.



The reason it fails is easier than you might have imagined: Interference - radio interference from the cables that go from to controller to the disks are too close to each other.

Try adding some anti-static material between the wires, Split and seperate from each other fully into the connector on the RAID card. There are two ports where up to 8 SATA /SAS drives can be connected on this card, it should have been built so that the 8 ports on the card was located away from each other on the card to prevent noise. There is nothing wrong with the card, more a design flaw, but the cables have to little isolation material and is also tightly packed together these SAS to SATA cables.

PS Graphics, memory modules and other PCI Express cards can also disturbe the data cables to the hard drives. I Recommended that the cables are placed so they do not come in contact with other units! It can also be a layer of anti-static material on both sides of the RAID card to shield it from other devices.

It may fail on some type of PCI Express ports, try to swap the ports if it does not work properly.

Also when using 8 disks in a computer make sure you have a strong enough PSU! I recommend minimum 700 watt.

I used one year on making this card work! I used the Highpoint tech support team with it until they ran out of suggestions. I tried tweaking all possible settings in the raid management tool, in bios etc.
I change from Intel to AMD chipset/cpu/motherboard.
I changed ram modules, powersupply( please with 8 disks use a minimum of 700 watt psu) cpu, disk brand from Western Digital to Seagate same problem, raid failed within a day! I also had slow copy and write speed, as slow as 2 mb a second!

(PS Some Gigabyte motherboard refuse to boot from the RocketRaid Controller, stay away from Gigabyte if u use a HighPoint Tech Rocket Raid card, other people on the net say the same thing)

So I think Interference! I remove the external isolation material on the SAS to SATA cables on the side to the raid card. I split each signal cable away from each other, AND NOW IT WORKS without failing.

SO this is the solution. I also added anti static material to the on both sides of the Raid card to shield it from interference!

Now I enjoy read / write speed on SSD disk up to 800 mb a second, and on Mechanical drives (the other raid )is 3 tb x 6 drives in RAID 50, Giving me a total of 12 TB of data. Works fine....Write speed 380 mb a second - read 600 mb a second.

http://www.webmaster-bjerke.no/main.php?side=raid
 
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