My new RAID 10 arrays are unstable and I don't know what to do

mh321

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Jun 11, 2013
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This is my first time setting up a RAID 10 on my 6 month old home computer. It has an Adaptec 5805 controller. I used to have 2 RAID 0 arrays on it, which were stable. I decided to upgrade to 4x Kingston V300 SSDs in RAID 10, and 4x Seagate ST1000DM003 in RAID 10.

I have been having problems with both arrays:
-I get frequent alarms on my RAID controller
-Both arrays will randomly get degraded/rebuild on system startup after a proper shutdown
-Chkdsk runs on random startups
-Sometimes Windows won't start up, and I only get a black screen until I repair it
-I get messages about delayed writes failing
-I have gotten "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume"
-I have gotten "The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur"
-One mechanical hard drive is not recognized by the RAID card anymore
-I get messages about a missing member of an array on startup sometimes

Turning both the controller write cache and the disks' write caches on seems to cause the most instability. Running the computer with either write cache on still causes instability, but maybe a little less often. Running with both write caches off seems to be most stable, but I still get problems. I would want to have write caching on, for better performance. All problems started when I installed and set up the new arrays a week ago, and continue to this moment. I haven't found out how to "make" the problems appear at will, they are random, but probably worsened when I do writes to the disks.

System specs:
Asus M5A99FX Pro R2.0 motherboard
Adaptec 5805 with 512mb cache running latest firmware and driver
4x New Kingston SSDnow V300 240GB in RAID 10
4x Manufacturer Refurbished Seagate Barracuda ST1000DM003 1TB in RAID 10
2x Norco SS-500 hot-swap backplanes/cages
Dual boot Windows XP Pro x64 and Server 2008 x64
Adaptec 29320A SCSI card connected to LTO-3 tape drive


Thanks


 
Solution
most likely interconnection, 6Gb/s SSD raid with backplane is a PITA you need a high quality cable and truly 6Gb/s backplane. Most back-plane out there every iffy when run multiple @ 6Gb/s buses

mh321

Honorable
Jun 11, 2013
70
0
10,630
I found out that the one mechanical hard drive that would refuse to be recognized by the controller is defective, when connected to a different computer, and diagnostics are ran.

I still don't know what's wrong with the rest of the stuff. Why can't I have the write cache enabled without problems?