Raid 1 Mirror Problems

Anonymous

September 29, 2009 8:44:31 PM

I have a Windows Vista Acer Aspire Core 2 Quad. When I bought the machine, I set it up with two 500G hard drives in Raid 1 Mirror. All worked well for about two years, the Western Digital HD went out. I replaced with a 500G Seagate. It lasted for about eight months and failed. Now, I have gone thru four seagate warranty replacements. The first failed in four weeks. The second in two weeks, the third in two days, and the fourth in two days. Seagate had no solution. I read one report online about someone who had five hard drives fail in a row in Raid 1, he then replaced the hard drive cables and the problem went away. One Sunday, I replaced the failed drive with a new Wester Digital 500G HD and new HD cables. I also took the latest HD from Seagate, put it in Thermaltake Max 4 external enclosure and attached it via ESATA. I thought I would be able to add it to the Raid Array. It was listed as a non-Raid HD but asked if I wanted it as a spare. I set it up as a spare. From what I have read, the spare will be added to the array if one of the HDs fail. Is that correct? I also want a bullet proof for raid solution. This is a home computer, I just want it to work and hopefully not be having to replace hard drives all the time and when I do, as easy as possible. It has been three days since installing the Western Digital HD and setting up the external external hard drive. Any suggestions on this would be greatly appreciated.

Terry

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sub mesa

September 30, 2009 12:09:25 AM

My advice: buy an SSD. While everyone talks about performance, many people dont realise enough that SSDs can offer significant reliability benefits over HDDs because of their fundamental different nature: no more moving parts.

But first you should investigate whether all those crashes you had are due you being extremely unlucky, or something else is going on. For example a power issue. Is your PC and everything else grounded? Are your voltages stable and within limits? Do you have a good quality power supply or a cheap one? All this matters.

Also, you didn't specify what kind of RAID you use; software RAID, onboard RAID or hardware RAID?

Good luck.

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Anonymous

October 1, 2009 2:57:28 PM

I have a new 400 watt power supply. Voltages seem stable. This morning, I just had a new Western Digital 500GB HD failed. It had been installed on Sunday. I am using software Raid 1. I took the just received Seagate hard drive and put in an external Thermaltake Max 4 Active Cooling enclosure. I added it to the array as a spare. This morning the WD failed and the spare Seagate was added to the array. I am using an Acer Aspire E700 Core 2 Quad, purchased in July 2007. I added a Maxtor and set up a Raid 1 mirror. The OE Western Digital failed at eight months. I replaced with a Seagate 500G. It lasted several months and failed. I have replaced the Seagate three additional times, one lasted two weeks, the two failed within three days. I have a APC battery back up, I have changed the internal ports once on the failing Seagates. I replaced the hard drive cables when I installed the Western Digital on Sunday and added a cooling fan on the front of the computer. I can't imagine that it would be a mother board problem. The Maxtor has been on Device Port 3 since July, 2007 without problems. Seagate had me send the last failed hard drive back to the factory for check out. I was thrilled to see the external Seagate was added to the array when the Western Digital failed. I have never used a spare in a Raid set up. I need to find someway to fix the problem but don't have a clue onther than the things I have done. Must be a logical diagnostic path to resolve this, I hope.

I would appreciate your thoughts.

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