[MelancholyRose]

I built this computer recently, less than a few months ago.

I haven't gotten any indication until today that, for some reason, my RAID 1 won't read one of my HDDs. I tried booting from both drives separately, and both will boot and run, only one seems to be "updated" and the other one seems to be "behind" by a few days/a week or so. When booting up from the disk that was "behind" it says it was recovering from an "unexpected shutdown" and I started her up in normal Windows, and of course that's when I noticed everything was behind and not up-to-date.

I'm using Hardware RAID on the motherboard itself.

My motherboard is an Asus M4A89TD Pro USB3.

When checking the RAID menu on startup, it seems to only detect one drive and when going into BIOS it seems to read RAID and the one drive separately.

How badly did I mess this up, and how do I fix this? Did something get corrupted?

Most importantly, how do I fix it without losing my data? Would I have to buy a whole new HDD?

Help is very much appreciated, especially if it's in a timely manner.

Thank you.

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Bump.

[MelancholyRose]

Bump.

[Digerati]

It could be that one drive is failing. When buying or building a RAID, you should always buy an identical spare drive to swap in, in the event of a failure. So I would swap in the spare. If it syncs up, you know your controller is working.

You might run chkdsk /r on the suspect drive.

[MelancholyRose]

Will it sync automatically if I swap in the new drive, even if it's an onboard controller?

[Digerati]

That's how RAIDs are supposed to work - mirrored RAIDs anyway.

[MelancholyRose]

All right, thank you for your input. I guess I have to buy myself a new drive.

[MelancholyRose]

Also, there seems to be something up with my BIOS-- before the RAID failed, it showed all SATA ports 1-6. My HDDs were on ports 1-2. Now it only shows 5-6, where my DVD drive is. When looking at my hard drives in BIOS it shows RAID(array name) and a hard drive separately. Is this because one of them failed, or is something wrong with my SATA ports, and maybe that's causing it? Although it seems far-fetched since one drive is up-to-date and the other is "behind".

[Digerati]

I don't think a hard drive failing in your RAID would mess up the BIOS like that - the other way around maybe. You might need to reset your BIOS and see what happens.

[Spyderturbo007]

I read this a couple weeks ago and found it interesting. It's a KB article by Western Digital about using consumer class HDDs in a RAID environment. It almost makes me regret using the WD Caviar Black drives in my RAID 1 NAS. Although I haven't had any problems in the year that the NAS has been up and running.

I'm not suggesting you go one way or the other, but thought I would throw that out there.

[MelancholyRose]

Hm, that sounds a lot like what's happened. Only problem is, I have no idea what to do about it. Should I just buy a new drive and hope they sync?

Both of my HDDs are WD Caviar Blue's. Maybe if I bought a hard drive of a different brand, I would have less bad luck with this?

Edited by MelancholyRose, 23 May 2011 - 08:29 AM.

[Spyderturbo007]

I've always been a fan of WD drives and have to be honest, I've run a couple different RAID setups with them and only had a drive drop one time. I slapped in my new drive, rebooted the computer and it rebuilt the array automatically. The Enterprise class drives are significantly more expensive than the consumer level drives, but do have longer warranties. Personally, I keep a spare on hand, that way if one of the drives falls out of the array, I can swap in the spare and ship the failed drive out to WD for a replacement.

Is your Blue drive still under warranty? It's probably cheaper just to stick with the consumer class drives and ship it back if it fails. Like I said above, I've only had that happen one time so it's not like it's common. I can't even say that the problem was the fact that it was a consumer class drive. It could have just been a typical hard drive failure.

I would personally pick up another Caviar Blue drive from a place like NewEgg, and ship the old one back with an RMA. It's going to be faster to buy a new drive than it will be for the RMA to be processed, I would think. That way you'll have a spare drive once you receive the replacement, provided your drive is still under warranty. But that's just my opinion.

Edited by Spyderturbo007, 23 May 2011 - 08:51 AM.

[MelancholyRose]

I still have to do a warranty check on it, but I'm sure it's still under warranty, I haven't had it for more than a few months, at least.
Is the hard drive still considered "failed" even though it's fully functional and can boot into Windows? The major problem with it is that it was a couple weeks behind the "good" drive. Would it still be a "failed" drive and need to be replaced? I have to say the fully working drive that's not caught up with the other one has me really, really confused and curious.

[Spyderturbo007]

I still have to do a warranty check on it, but I'm sure it's still under warranty, I haven't had it for more than a few months, at least.
Is the hard drive still considered "failed" even though it's fully functional and can boot into Windows? The major problem with it is that it was a couple weeks behind the "good" drive. Would it still be a "failed" drive and need to be replaced? I have to say the fully working drive that's not caught up with the other one has me really, really confused and curious.

That's a good question. When mine dropped out of the array, I just submitted the RMA stating that the drive fell out of the array. I hadn't even bothered to try and boot the drive. They RMAed it without question. WD support is pretty awesome if you ask me.

You could try formatting the drive and reinstalling it into the array. Perhaps there was just a delay writing data to the disk that caused it to drop from the array. You might be able to check with WD support and see what they have to say about the issue.

[MelancholyRose]

Well, I already bought an additional drive. I figured I should have it anyway, just in case.
Would it be safe to reformat the drive that's behind? When I boot up each drive, my system reads them as being in the RAID, so I wanted to be sure it didn't damage my RAID.

[Digerati]

I agree that WD's RMA support is great. Plug in the serial number into their RMA wizard and it will tell you if still under warranty. Most WD drive are warrantied for 3 or 5 years.

Then send (shipping paid) you a new drive before you send the bad one in. That's really cool - keeps your downtime to a minimum, and it is nice they trust you. You do need to provide a credit card number and they will charge you for a new drive if they don't received the old in 30 days. But 30 days is plenty time to return the old. I just put the old in the same shipping box the new arrived in. And if in the US, WD has a deal with UPS for discount return shipping if you prepay for the label via a special UPS link.

What I prefer to do is run the diagnostics provided by the maker. It if fails their own diagnostics, there's no question there's a problem.