RAID 0 Hard Drive Problem. Power Supply?

kirving

Hi

A few week ago I got an error message from the Intel Rapid Storage RAID controller saying that there was an issue one of my hard drives. I clicked "reset disk to normal" and all appeared to be well.

The other day, and subsequently on turning on the PC, I get an error message from the BIOS saying that a boot device could not be found, and then another message saying that "Array 0 has failed".

I can just press enter to bypass these and start windows as usual, albeit very slowly. The PC (Dell Studio XPS 8100) seems to run OK after that, but sometimes becomes unresponsive for short periods.

I'm also getting errors from Dell's PC Checkup, and Intel's RAID controller software continuously now. Dell's software also said that " because these errors have aorrured during the normal operation of your drive, they may not indicated a fatal error", or something along those lines.

Two days ago, the screen went nuts as if there was an issue with the graphics card, which I thought could be related to overheating. I gave the PC a full cleanout with compressed air as I usually do every few months, and noticed when I turned it back on that the "5VSB LED" on the mobo remained powered on.

Looking this up online, I found that this means that only the 5V supply is working correctly. So problems with the 12V supply?

Two hardware issues(HDD and GFX) with the PC in a short space of time is unlikely, so I'm wondering whether a faulty power supply could be affecting both. Looking at voltages in Speedfan, the -12V and -5V supplies look to be way off the mark, while the rest look ok. I don't know how much weighting to give this however, as I know that the temperature for Core 1 is incorrect. (OpenHardwareMonitor says 53 degrees)

I'm really looking for advice as to what to check next, as replacing a drive in raid 0 is a pain, and would mean I'd have to also buy an external drive just to allow me to do it.

Thanks,
Kev

kirving

Just an update on this.

In anticipation of the drive failing, I bought an external hard drive, and the majority of the stuff I wanted to keep onto it. I didn't get all of what I wanted though, and the day after I moved most of my stuff, the PC wouldn't start up.

I just get a black screen with "Error!" stated before windows starts. I've tried another power supply and that's definitely not the issue. I booted from and Ubuntu Live CD which sees the hard drives, but can't get much data(info on no. of partitions, status, etc) from the failed drive. I also downloaded Partition Magic and booted from a CD. Scanning the disc showed a load of bad sectors.

At this stage I've accepted that I've lost some data, but what are my options of recovery? Either DIY or professional(cheaply!).

whizbang

Raid ? what type.

If you pull the faulty drive, and boot windows(?), is there an option to ignore the missing drive and continue without?

coylemj

Doesn't RAID-0 involve striping the data across all of the disks in the set with no redundancy? AFAIK a disk failure in RAID-0 is curtains i.e. you lose everything.

kirving

coylemj wrote: »

Doesn't RAID-0 involve striping the data across all of the disks in the set with no redundancy? AFAIK a disk failure in RAID-0 is curtains i.e. you lose everything.

It does alright! I'm not sure why one drive has failed but I've resigned myself to having lost the data I didn't back up.

I'm really just looking for DIY options or cheap methods that I have a bash at rather than going down the extremely expensive route of forensic data recovery.

Cuddlesworth

Kevin Irving wrote: »

It does alright! I'm not sure why one drive has failed but I've resigned myself to having lost the data I didn't back up.

I'm really just looking for DIY options or cheap methods that I have a bash at rather than going down the extremely expensive route of forensic data recovery.

http://www.freeraidrecovery.com/Default.aspx

You could have a shot at that. Your OS is foo-bar either way at this stage.

You would either need to bring both drives to another machine or build a new OS on yours with a "new" hard-drive. Don't use either of the existing drives for that until the data is recovered.

If all your data is now on a single external HDD then you are back in the same position that you were when you had RAID 0. If your external drive dies you stand to lose everything.

All drives die eventually and you should never try to predict how long they will last. Assume they'll die on day 1, that's the only way you'll take appropriate measures to backup your data.

coylemj

RAID-0 gives you excellent performance and 100% capcity utilisation but with terrible reliability.

Say the chances of an individual disk failing on a given day is 1 is 1,000. That means that the chances that the disk will not fail is 0.999

With RAID-0, you need both disks to not fail, the probability of this is 0.999 squared which is 0.998001 or in probability terms 499/500 i.e. there is a one in 500 chance that one of the disks will fail in which case you will lose all of the data.

With RAID-1 (data mirroring) you only get 50% of the raw capacity but the probability stacks up in your favour. As long as only one disks fails, you lose no data and the probability of both disks failing on the given day is is 0.001 squared or one in a million.

This means that a RAID-1 array is 2,000 times more relaible that the same two HDDs in a RAID-0 array.

In the real world, RAID-0 is only used for read-only databases where high performance is critical but where the master copy is held on other media i.e. slower disks so if the RAID-0 array fails, there is no loss of data.