Mutliple raid 5 and drive problems. knowledge needed!

[JimbobjoDahobo]

alright so I've come to grips with it. I'm a huge data packrat. I back up everything. Every game I bought or pirated, every home video I backed up from VHS, all my dvds, and tons of random *** I've collected over the years and moved from computer to computer.

I have a raid 5 array with ~12TB total space (about 5 used up), and I really enjoy the speed and added security(albeit expensive)

Yesterday one of my drives mysteriously dropped out and then came back up today, and I'm currently rebuilding. Plus my 9650se battery backup fizzled or some ***, I got some voltage low errors and then it just stopped working.

Everything old is pretty much backed up on old computers, but those drives are aging fast.

If I have very little money to throw at this what should I do? Do you guys think my data is secure enough?

Do your drives ever shut down for random reasons without actual damage just some weird electrical anomaly?

 

[r_manic]

Why do you need RAID 5 in the first place? Can't you just back-up for your old stuff by moving it to another drive, instead of trying to combine everything into one, massive, and expensive shebang?

 

[JimbobjoDahobo]

Well raid 5 is nice because I can lose ANY drive out of the array and not lose ANY information (assuming it works as planned). If I have a bunch of drives to back up everything I'd need twice the space, and if I didn't back up everything I could lose alot if one drive failed.

 

[endorphines]

i'd swap out the drive that dropped out asap, just because it came back means nothing. also, what is your raid card, it must be pretty high end if it has a battery backup unit.
before you do the swap check our cabling, if a sata cable slipped part way out but got jiggled back in it would produce the behavior you're describing.
where did you see the voltage errors? that sounds very worrisome.

 

[JimbobjoDahobo]

i'd swap out the drive that dropped out asap, just because it came back means nothing. also, what is your raid card, it must be pretty high end if it has a battery backup unit.
before you do the swap check our cabling, if a sata cable slipped part way out but got jiggled back in it would produce the behavior you're describing.
where did you see the voltage errors? that sounds very worrisome.

It's a 9650se and the voltage errors were in the 3ware disk manager. I've seen a few people complaining about a faulty BBU, but it's out of warranty at this point and I can't buy a new one yet.

I did get a SMART threshold exceeded error before it dropped out again so I haven't powered on that computer since. I really don't want to lose all the data by some freak stroke of bad luck that causes 2 drives to fail.

Jiggling the cable didn't seem to do anything although it isn't easy to reach through the other wires.

I was working full time when I bought and assembled this computer, but now I've moved back in with mom and dad so I can go back to school full time. Which turns out to be why I wasn't able to check this thread (cramming for 2 tests+a research paper)

Is there a data backup program with some extreme compression that I could squish this data down to a more manageable size?

Hope you're still out there reading.