Defraging a RAID 0 array?

[hagatha]

Greetings,

I have recently purchased a "true hardware RAID Controller card" http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816151031&Tpk=arc-1200 The performance increase is really noticeable...

The problem I'm having is that after a clean install of Vista 64 on 2 new HHD's with the RAID controller... All my software loaded and everything set the way I wanted it... and tried to defrag the array, using a licensed copy of Perfect Disk 2008... Everything seemed to start off ok... but at some point in the defrag, the RAID crashed and of course I had to start over...

Any insight on what happened and what is the trick to defraging an array? I'm not ready to try it again... lol, until I exhaust my options first...

Thanks

I've since read some other forums and found there may be a driver conflict... with ha20x2k.sys this file seems to be related to X-Fi. Not sure how it all comes together but... I have also requested support from Raxco on the subject...

hagatha

 

[Zecow]

crash.. as in crash to desktop or crash - reboot?

 

[hagatha]

Crash as in the card alarm went off... and if you tried to reboot it would just hang... no BIOS... nada... I had to go into the RAID setup (the only option I had) and delete the array and start from scratch... that kinda crash...

hagatha

 

[mike99]

Does Perfect Disk see the Array, or the individual drives? Reccommend you use drive makers diagnostic to test the drives before rebuilding the array. Defragging gives drives a lot of activity and will show any tendancy to fail or intermittant fault. What array are you planning to use?

Mike.

 

[hagatha]

Thanks!
The array is a RAID 0 Striped... the disks are new Seagate 250's, when I "analyze" the array using PD2008 it is shown as a single disk of 500gb. Before I setup the RAID I did a chk dsk and a new format NTSF, there were no issues with the drives.


Thanks again
hagatha

 

[enlightenment]

He meant you use the driver makers diagnostic, not perfect disk.

You can download "Ultimate Boot CD" on there are all the utilities you'll need (and lots more). Since you have Seagate disks, launch the seagate DOS diagnostic and check to see if any disk has problems. Also checkout the SMART data to see if any internal errors were logged.

Defragmenting can expose media errors and depending on the RAID engine might explain why you got a broken RAID.

 

[enlightenment]

Also, disks repair themselves. Analyse the SMART data and look for an attribute "Reallocated sector count" to see if the drive has repaired itself. A drive which previously had problems can still pass all tests; thus masking its earlier (fixable) defect.

While fixing media errors, drives may get kicked out of the array because the controller expects the drive to respond in an amount of time. If they don't, it will get dropped outside of the array and you have to merge/re-activate the array again.