Raid-5 Device disconnects from the system

[unky2020]

Hello once again,

I bought an additional Raid-5 PCI Controller Card providing 4 SATA channels. I connected 4 Hard Drives and created a Raid-5. This Raid-5 was running well for the first month of using it (Computer was turned on 24/7).
However now, everytime I restart the computer or I resume from hibernate mode, the Raid-5 disk drives just "disconnects" about 2 minutes after Windows Vista started.

Here is the message from the event viewer:

Event 12: The device 'SiImage SCSI Disk Device' (SCSI\Disk&Ven_SiImage&Prod_&Rev_0000\5&6a97489&3&001000) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

I already checked each HDD connected to the Raid-5 and I think they are all Okay. I checked the Sata cables and I dont see a problem there.

Any ideas what to do about it?
I already tried the latest drivers, didnt work.

- System is Windows Vista 64 Bit
- The Raid Controller and the 4 Disks show up during boot process of the computer
- The Controller is always visible in the device mananger in Windows
- The Controller is a Silicon Image Sil 3114 Raid 5 Controller

 

[mikey5802]

What brand and model hard drives are you using in the array? Are they RAID certified?

 

[unky2020]

all Disks are Western Digital WD EARS 1 TB Drives. I dont think the HDDs are the problem though

- When I uninstall the Sil 3114 Raid Controller in the device manager and then scan for new hardware, it finds the Controller and the Raid-5 Disk device. However after 2 minutes it disconnects again with the same message:

Event 12 PlugPlay Manager: The device 'SiImage SCSI Disk Device' (SCSI\Disk&Ven_SiImage&Prod_&Rev_0000\5&6a97489&3&001000) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

 

[mikey5802]

Yeah, I agree it's probably not the drives... You should contact tech support for the card and if they deem it should be RMA'd.

There's a thing called TLER (Time Limited Error Recovery) that I thought might have been part of the problem. Regular HDD's have a longer time period for TLER than certified RAID drives do. If an error is encountered, the time to try to recover from that error (being less on a RAID HDD than a regular HDD) can cause a drive to drop out of an array.