Is one of my hard drives on the way out?

[EdwardK]

Hello everyone,

I have got 2 Western Digital 40Gb hard drives set up as RAID 1 on a Promise FastTrak TX2. In the past 2 weeks, I have for the 3rd time, warning that the RAID 1 setup is critical. Upon running the Promise Monitoring Utility, I found out that Channel 1 is critical. I have to rebuild my RAID everytime this warning comes up.
Does this mean that my hard drive on Channel 1 is going to die soon? :-?

Thank you in advance for all your help.

Cheers,
Edward

 

[Handruin]

Hello everyone,

I have got 2 Western Digital 40Gb hard drives set up as RAID 1 on a Promise FastTrak TX2. In the past 2 weeks, I have for the 3rd time, warning that the RAID 1 setup is critical. Upon running the Promise Monitoring Utility, I found out that Channel 1 is critical. I have to rebuild my RAID everytime this warning comes up.
Does this mean that my hard drive on Channel 1 is going to die soon? :-?

Thank you in advance for all your help.

Cheers,
Edward

It's possible, but you might want to check that your cables are OK, and that perhaps the power cable to the drive isn't causing it to spin down.

I'm not sure if my next suggestion is feasible, but what if you disconnect the known good drive and then run WD's diagnostic tools on the suspected hard drive? This way you leave you valid copy out of the machine and then you can run their utility which can check for bad clusters.

 

[blakerwry]

sounds like a good course of action to me...

you might also want to take this as an oppurtunity to backup any files dear to you or possibly image the entire HDD.

 

[Tea]

Handruin is making good sense, EdwardK. The need to rebuild the array so often scares me considerably.

 

[EdwardK]

Thank you for your advise and help. Thank goodness I backed up all my data to CD-R because that particular hard drive finally failed on me. Now I have to shop for a new hard drive!

Cheers,
Edward

 

[Jake the Dog]

not trying to spend your money mate but wouldn't you be better shopping for two new drives? a matched pair of drives are a safer bet when RAIDing.

 

[blakerwry]

how is it any safer? wouldn't you just lose space if you added say, a 800BB.

 

[P5-133XL]

how is it any safer? wouldn't you just lose space if you added say, a 800BB.

No there is a performance issue and a stability issue too.. Yes you lose any surplus space. In addition, the raid-1 array can only run as fast as the slowest drive; When writing to the array both drives must report a success before going on to the next write. There is also a stability issue for many controllers because if there is any signifigent delay between the drives then the controller may report a drive as failed when it has not. This is particularly noticable with SW raid (like a FastTrack controller) as opposed to true HW raid because of the multiple tasks the CPU is doing simultanously can exaserbate the delays.

However, there is no need to buy two matched drives when you can still get one of the same make and model; The differences between firmware versions don't normally cause problems

 

[EdwardK]

Thank you Mark for your very helpful explanation. For a moment I was worried that I have to buy 2 matched drives

Cheers,
Edward

 

[P5-133XL]

There is one qualification for the matched drive requirement that was not mentioned. WD has several drive models that have two different platter densities. For example the WD1200 series can be had with 40GB platters or with 60GB platters. You really should get a drive with the same platter density as what you currently have because that is probably too much of a difference (unlike firmware version differences). I don't know if the model you have has this problem.

 

[EdwardK]

Actually, I had not thought of platters. Mark, thanks for reminding me about this. When I bought those 2 hard drives about 2 years ago, I bought 2 of the same model (WD400BB) and had not given much thought to platters and firmware.

Thanks again for all your help.

Cheers,
Edward