Raid failure hard drives seem ok

ScumLord

I have two hard drives in a raid 1 setup. The other day I got a notice to say the volumes redundancy failed. The computer had been acting terribly up to that warning with blue screens and jittery performance. I had reinstalled windows twice in the last few days. This raid array doesn't have the OS on it it's just storage however I did install a lot of programs on it and had moved personal folders there.

The problem is despite it saying the raid failed, it didn't say which hard drive had failed, when I go to break the mirror one HD should have a red x beside it and neither does. When I ran HDTune it would crash one of the hard drives and the volume would disappear.

I do have an error in event viewer saying ATAPI "detected a controller error on Device\Ide\Ideport3".

I opened up the PC and swapped the Sata cable out for a new one and moved the raid volumes from those ports (standard one) to 6gb sata ports (which I had avoided due to a recall on this board due to high speed ports when it was released). Since doing that the errors have gone, HDTune runs through without crashing and the hard drive shows no errors.

So maybe I had a bad cable or the standard sata port has a problem? Is there any other way to find out if the hard drive is still good. It's under warranty until February 2013. If the hard drive is fine can I restart the raid mirror?

yoyo

Using something like Vivard available on UBCD (linked) will do a surface scan of the drive, and identify any hardware issues. A dodgy bios or sata cable can cause serious issues with sata drives, looking like a drive failure when in fact it isnt

Nick