RAID issue

youcancallmeal

I'm running 2x2TB hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration for the last 8 months or so. About a month ago one of my drives failed with an error saying the hard drive wasn't present. I had moved the PC a couple of days before that and thought maybe something came loose, I opened it up and made sure all the connections were connected fine (They looked fine). Anyway I booted back up and it picked up the missing hard drive and rebuilt the RAID array.

Fast forward to today and same thing happened. Event log showed the PC shut down unexpectedly while I was out and when it restarted the hard drive was missing again. I did the same thing as last time and my missing hard drive was picked up again and its now rebuilding.

Has this kind of thing ever happened to anyone? Any ideas on what I should do?

Maj Malfunction

Assuming you have physically disconnected & reconnected the power and SATA cables to our hard drive & motherboard (not just "they look fine")

Then you should:

1. Backup all your important data straight away.

2. Check the SMART status in the BIOS. Are you getting any errors?

3. Run a hard drive test. You can usually get these utilities from the HDD manufacturer to preform some thorough diagnostics on the drives themselves to ensure they are running ok and are error free.

2. Have you added any new hardware, printers, keyboards, joysticks etc recently. Other than moving the PC has anything else changed? Could that be the source of the problem?

4. Possible power issue? How old is the Power Supply Unit, what wattage is it? If you have say 4 HDD's, Blueray, CDROM, Dual-GFX cards etc and 600W PSU... expect problems :-)

5. Is the same hard drive failing or does the problem alternate?

youcancallmeal

Thanks for the reply

1. Unfortunately the RAID array is nearly full so I have no where to back up all the data to. I have backed up some important files to another smaller RAID1 array on the same PC. I'm hoping to set up a 2x3TB RAID1 array once the drives become more affordable.

2. SMART status shows everything is healthy.

3. I plan to run some hard drive diagnostics over xmas when I get some free time.

4. I have about 9 USB devices running but its been like that for a good few months now.

5. Power should be fine, I have a Corsair 850HX which should be more than enough for my setup (Intel i5-750, MSI P55-GD80 ,Corsair Dominator DDR3 4GB nVidia GTX280, Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit)

6. Not sure which hard drive is failing. The way I've tidied the cables in my case makes it hard to see which drive is physically plugged into which sata port on the motherboard. If it fails again I'll probably strip out all the hard drives and try to find out which one it is.


One more thing that I think might be related is that my PC had been up and running for 9 days when the array failed, the event log shows the pc crashed with an IASTOR.SYS blue screen error. My PC is never usually running for that long without a restart or a bit of downtime so maybe there was memory leak or something?

Maj Malfunction

If your SMART status is reporting normal this is a good sign, chances are you don't have a hardware problem with the HDD's.

850W PSU is more than adequate for what your running, so all good there.

The IASTOR.SYS file is a driver related to the Intel RAID controller/Intel Matrix Storage manager. This might well be no more than a Windows 7 driver issue.

Reinstall the above using the latest drivers from your motherboard manufacturer or from the Intel website and if your still having problems then run the HDD diagnostics.


PS: Nice system and good luck!

BaconZombie

I have little to no faith in SMART status report.
If you have any data on the array that you can;t loose, you should really have it storage on other media on an offsite location.

And a offsite location, can we your parents house, a friends house/apt, Deposit Box at a bank.

Edit

TL;DR

RAID =! Backup

Maj Malfunction wrote: »

If your SMART status is reporting normal this is a good sign, chances are you don't have a hardware problem with the HDD's.

850W PSU is more than adequate for what your running, so all good there.

The IASTOR.SYS file is a driver related to the Intel RAID controller/Intel Matrix Storage manager. This might well be no more than a Windows 7 driver issue.

Reinstall the above using the latest drivers from your motherboard manufacturer or from the Intel website and if your still having problems then run the HDD diagnostics.


PS: Nice system and good luck!

youcancallmeal

If anything I probably have too much back ups! Take for example a folder containing some important documents. This folder is on my 2x2TB array, another 2x500GB array on the same PC and also on an external hard drive I back up to occasionally (but not often enough). Thats 5 copies of the same folder! I'm also building a second PC for my parents, I'm going to put an extra hard drive in that PC so that should count as my "offsite" storage. If someone were to break into my house the only thing I would care about is my hard drives cause everything else is replaceable!

youcancallmeal

Well its failed again for no apparent reason. It just came up saying one of the disks from the RAID array was missing. I restarted my PC and the missing hard drive was detected again but it didn't automatically rebuild the array like before. When I select the option to rebuild a RAID Array it doesnt let me select the hard drive on Port 1?

BigEejit

In your earlier comment you said that you have two raid groups on the same PC and a have a file on both of them and a seperate usb drive. Consider a nasty virus or power strike, you would be down to 1 copy (possibly zero copies if the usb drive was connected to the pc at the time!)

SMART does not work when drives are raided (well, never has for me) can you download a tool that checks SMART drives? You may find that the Intel raid chip is sending data from one drive only or even making up information.

Did you confirm if the drive that keeps dropping from the raid group is the same drive each time? If so I would suggest trying a new drive.

BigEejit

Also as mentioned, raid =! backup.

I gave a 16GB usb stick to my brothers and sisters, they all have their digital photos on them and they are mostly keeping them in the car. Why? how many digital photos would you have left if the house burned down? .... yes its a worst case scenario, but it happens and there is no reason to lose digital media at all.

youcancallmeal

Okay I got HD Tune which has some good diagnostic tools and its reporting an Ultra DMA CRC Error on the drive in question which means its either a loose or faulty cable. I'm going to replace it later and hopefully should sort it out.

With Regards backing up I was thinking of setting up an old PC as a NAS so that will be even more places to back up to! I'm not a fan of keeping things on USB sticks because I've had so many of them die on me over the last few years.

BigEejit

youcancallme>al wrote: »

With Regards backing up I was thinking of setting up an old PC as a NAS so that will be even more places to back up to! I'm not a fan of keeping things on USB sticks because I've had so many of them die on me over the last few years.

Well, I have to admit that I dont trust USB sticks either. But a stick in the car is better than nothing at all. Also, they last a lot longer when they are not in your pocket all the time or stuck in your computer all the time. I also have copies on DVD's (also in the car), but they are normally some months behind the copies on my pc.