Raid 1 help please

Gaz J

Gaz J

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Hoping someone can give me some advice here.

I had a PC built by Chillblast earlier this year. It has a SSD where all the software resides and 2 x 1TB hard drives configured in a Raid 1.

Over the last couple of days when I have switched the computer on its making an odd noise. At first I thought it was the CPU cooler which is a large dual fan effort but on removing the side of the case that doesn't appear to be the issue. If I turn the PC off and then restart its OK.

I began to wonder if the noise was coming from one of the hard drives.

On the PC I have Inter Rapid Storage Technology. If I open this it tells me that both drives are ok but then underneath that it has the message.

SATA_Array_0000
Volume_0000 Verifying and repairing x% complete.

Does this mean that one of the drives is failing. If so how do I identify which one.

Also I back up my photographs to three external hard drives so having a Raid 1 isn't that important to me. Is it a fairly straightforward job to remove the Raid 1 set up and just have two separate drives showing on the PC.

Also when the rebuild is happening then opening large TIFFS is pretty slow. I'm assuming because of the rebuild.

The PC is under warranty but before I contact Chillblast I was hoping for some opinions from the computer wizzs we have on here.

Cheers
 
theres normally a raid utility, either a windows program or in the bios or by pressing a separate key during boot. depends on the chipset.

if you don't want to replace the raid just backup your data, "break the array" by turning raid off in the bios/raid util and then restore your data.
 
1st thing - if the array is rebuilding then performance will be SLOW. So that explains that.

The causes for an array rebuild are many, if the PC shut down unexpectedly that would cause it.

The benefit of raid 1 is that the information should be duplicated on both drives. You could try disconnecting one drive and just disable the raid function. Just make sure that your backups are up to date.
 
Thanks for the replies. Downloaded Sentinel Hard Drive programme and have run this several times and all seems to be good with both drives in the Raid.

Will have to investigate further. Given that there are not a great deal of moving parts in there it seems to point one of the fans.

Thanks again.
 
I just wonder if the fact that I saw the drive rebuilding threw me.

I have looked at the CPU temps and all is good there. The CPU cooler is a twin fan affair and I'm wondering if its the second one starting up that's the problem. I will leave the side off the case for a couple of days and hopefully I will be able to track it down or at least confirm that its not the hard drives.
 
The message states verify and repair. It is possible that your raid card is trying to be decent.

A good raid controller will start a background scrub, verify and repair cycle at regular intervals. If that is what your card is doing, nothing to worry about, it is regular maintenance.
A verify will read every sector of both disks, compare, look for bad sectors and reassign if necessary.
However, a good raid controller will do this, but not at major detriment to user IO. (a good one will feel like it is running at 90% for random IO, barely noticeable for large file reads).

I don't know about Sentinel, download a program that can read the SMART data from the disks (assuming the raid card exposes it), look for bus resets, this is what I would usually expect to see if a semi-bad disk had managed to initiate a rebuild to itself.

Edit:
Another thing to note, non-decent raid controllers might restart their verify a 0% if the machine is rebooted during the operation :(
 
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