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Yet more troubles with RAID 5 stability

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peppergomez

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After a disastrous experience with 4 shit quality Seagate Barrracuda 3TB drives in RAID 5 mode, which hosed my data when 2 of the drives died in quick succession, I bought 4 HGST Deskstar NAS H3IKNAS40003272SN (0S03664) 4TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" High-Performance Hard Drives. They are now in RAID 5, on a Windows 10 system. I've had them running for 2 months now.


I'm kind of worried about my system though, in the last few weeks. It's been hard rebooting itself with increasing regularity lately, for no apparent reason. It just shuts off, no BSOD.

How can I get any info from Windows 10 about what is causing this?


Tonight this HGST RAID 5 just dropped out. It's my D drive (OS is on my C drive, which is a RAID 0 4 SSD setup. The D drive disappeared from the list of available drives under This PC in Windows 10. I was in the middle of some resource-intensive actions when it went. Importing a bunch of images in Lightroom, importing my entire photo folders in Capture One, editing in Lightroom, and importing a folder in Exposure X.

When I rebooted, it was back.


Looking in Intel Rapid Storage Technology, I see my 4 SSD drives in the SATA_Array_0000 but only see 2 of the 4 TB HDD (3,726 GB technically) drives below that. Not any kind of SATA Array beside them. I think there are supposed to be 4 displayed there. Not sure why Intel Rapid Storage Technology is only listing two. Windows 10 does list D drive correctly however- 9.68 TB. I have 760 GB free. I will offload a few TB from it soon to free up room.


If I lose my data in a RAID 5 dual drive failure for a second time within 5 months, I will probably destroy all of my computer equipment in a blind rage. I've been backing stuff up to spare drives, but another crash, with these HGST drives, would be fucking ridiculous.

So if you have any suggestions on some basic troubleshooting that I should do at the point to determine a) sudden reboots and b) RAID 5 dropout, that would be much appreciated.

If the RAID 5 is encountering problems, and if a drive in it has died, I am unaware, since neither Windows nor Intel has given me any heads up.


Thanks.
 
Check the System section of Event Viewer for logs. If the system isn't configured to halt on BSOD, it's easy to miss them.

Check your PSU under load. It could well be that the stress is pulling it out of spec.

Then re-architect your storage approach. If you care about your data, stop using Intel's integrated RAID-5. Either put your storage on another box (ZFS, BTRFS), get a hardware RAID card, or don't use anything more complex than RAID 10. It should be apparent just how precarious using a half-assed software array can be.

Be consistent with your backups. Seagate has an 8TB drive for around $200. Between that and Crashplan/Backblaze, you shouldn't ever lose anything you can't reproduce.
 
Agreed, just grab a Dell T20 + 8Gb stick of ECC RAM and install FreeNAS on it and stick all your HDDs there.
 
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