RAID -- MIRROR CONFIG

[mikeyb_in_sd]

OK, thanks for the sticky on the RAID.. Here's my prob;; I have an ASUS A7N8X DELUXE using the onboard Sil Image chipset, running 2 Maxtor 6Y080M0 HD's. About a month ago, i noticed on boot up, that the bios dump sez RAID SET NOT COMPLETE. I go into set up and hit "Rebuil RAID" but the message is "Not Rebuildable" OK, I have a dead drive I assume and it's running on the mirror..

Here's where I'm lost. I call up my local store and ask them to sell me a SATA HD and they tell me that not all SATA HD's are compatible with the RAID system.. And then they throw in some stuff about the JD specification.. At this point my eyes glazed over.. Look I just wanna buy something and replace the dead drive. I understand that my Maxtor no longer exists, but my MB manual sez that I can use a bigger drive, but the system will still report as a 40 gig or whatever. what do I do? Can somebody tell me something, here?

Last but not least, i do not have an OS install disk. After studying this the past few days, i thought if I buy a, say, West Digital 120 gigger , mirror the existing drive, then buy another new WD drive, and everything would be peaches and cream again.

Or how about this: I install a drive on the IDE bus and Ghost the boot up disk.. The curveball is I do not have an XP PRO OS disk. The scary part is I'm in school, and I'm running Access and Excel projects right now, and I don't need a hard crash right now.. But i have backed everything up

Thanks, people, for your opinions and suggestions

 

[BushLin]

As your manual says it's ok to use a larger capacity drive but it will only show up as big as your smallest drive in the array, for RAID it's ideal to be running identical drives on the same firmware as this reduces the chance of one drive waiting for another to catch up with it. You should be able to use your current (working) drive on it's own and fit a replacement when you get a chance, if you don't want to ditch your current working drive then try to get another that's as close as possible in capacity, spin speed and manufacturer. I don't know of any drives that are 'incompatible' with RAID but only certain drives are qualified for 24hr operation and they could have been talking about that or simply trying to flog you more expensive kit.

 

[PCcashCow]

The local store could have also hinted to compatibility with raid configurations using drives with NCQ and the like.

However, I had a similar issue. You deff want to torrent yourself a bootable copy of Ghost 9.x or higher and create a backup. I would double check however on a single channel (or in another system)to verify if your drive is truly dead. It may have some bad sectors on it and my need a zero fill to res erect it. The Ghost back up will be about 3/4's the size of your current system usage, so you'll need to make room, or place the back up on a network share\ DVDs to bring the system back up.

I know that Ghost 10 allows you upon restore onto another system to select a fill or expand option onto the unused space. Be sure to select this, otherwise you will have partitioned space within the new raid.

Good luck.

 

[mikeyb_in_sd]

Received, and thanks for opinions.. I went to another computer store in my town (beautiful hot 100 degree El Cajon) and the store owner tells me he'd love to sell me some HD's.. But he tells me that Maxtor's have a 5 year no questions asked warranty.. You just have to know the serial number , model number etc.. Hmm I might check that out.. Being down a week is a drag though.. Supposedly. Maxtor was bought out by Seagate and they still honor warranty's. I'm looking at $300 (OS and 2 HD's) I gotta make a decision in the next couple of days.

thanks all! MB in SD

 

[SomeJoe7777]

If indeed only one of the drives is bad, the Silicon Image controller should tell you which one. It should also tell you specifically whether you're running a RAID-1 (mirror) or RAID-0 (striping).

Assuming you were running a RAID-1 as you say, you should be able to replace the failed drive with another drive the same size or larger, go into the Silicon Image controller setup, and tell it to rebuild the mirror. After the rebuild, the system should boot as it did before, with full mirror redundancy.

To my knowledge, there are no SATA drives that are "incompatible" with RAID controllers. The SATA interface specification is identical regardless of whether the drive is being used as a standalone drive or part of a RAID.

Now, since your old drives were 80GB drives that are no longer available, your replacement drive will have some space unused. Assuming you get say a 120GB drive, it will have 40GB unused. Your drive in Windows will still show as an 80GB drive as it always has.

Now, if you want to be bold, you can get 2 new drives (say 2 120GB drives), and expand your drive to 120GB by doing the following procedure:

1. Disconnect the failed 80GB drive, connect a new 120GB.
2. Go into the SI controller BIOS and rebuild the mirror.
3. Boot up to Windows to verify everything's working.
4. Disconnect the other 80GB drive, replace it with the 2nd 120GB drive.
5. Go into the SI controller BIOS and rebuild the mirror again.
6. Boot up to Windows to make sure everything's still working.
7. Use Partition Magic 8 to expand the RAID partition from 80GB to 120GB without losing data.
8. Boot back up to Windows and your C: drive will now show as 120GB and will still be mirrored.

 

[mikeyb_in_sd]

Ok, great... Now, why is it that the people at the computer stores keep saying that unless the RPM's and access times are the same, it won't work.. I'll admit ignorance here.. I don't know what to do..

thanks again 8)

 

[mikeyb_in_sd]

OK, sounds good.. Last question: (I'm trying to do this cheaply)

My current Maxtor is a 6Y080M0 about 3 years old

A local store of mine has a 6V080E0. Comparing specs, the buffer and RPM are the same.. The difference is the interface is SATA 3.0 Gb/s
and my original is 1.5 I assume the interface refers to the access speed?

thanks..

 

[PCcashCow]

There shouldn't be a problem there, its the same as the IDE 66/100/133 interfaces. They can all co-exist, but will operate at the slowest drives speed.

 

[SomeJoe7777]

Yes, SATA 3.0 Gb/sec interface specification (also known as SATA-II) is newer than the original SATA-I specificaton of 1.5 Gb/sec. A SATA-II drive is generally backward compatible to a SATA-I interface (but it will run at original SATA-I speed).

The reason that it's recommended that the drives in a RAID-0 or RAID-1 be identical is so that they have identical access/seek times, transfer rates, rotational latencies, cache algorithms, elevator seek algorithms, etc. This results in the controller working at maximum efficiency because under all conditions, the drives perform identically. If one drive is different, the controller loses efficiency because one drive will generally finish a task before the other, and the controller will have to wait to dispatch another task to the drives until the lagging drive completes the previous task.

However, the only thing you lose is efficiency. No data loss or other problem will occur.

 

[mikeyb_in_sd]

EXCELLENT..All I'm doing right now is Access and Excel junk.

Thanks again for the great info and your time.. I need to write some checks to you all :[D