Windows damaged raid?

[Spectar]

Hi there, i have a serious Problem.
I got 3x WD Caviar Green 1TB Sata 6Gb/s on thusday and made a hardware Raid01 on my Asus M4A89GTD Pro/usb3, using the special raid programs from the bios. There was no real problem doing that and it is shown as one "Logical Drive" with 2.99TB (inside the program).
I tried to install Windows 7, loaded in the newest raid driver for sb850 and during the installation the raid was found.

Now the Problem:
While partitioning, i wanted to make 1 800GB and on 2.2TB Partition. So i made the first split and formated it. But the second part. (800GB) didn´t do anything. In fact, it was not deletable, the other part not extendable. While i tried some things on that drive, some error massages occured. Well, i thought to just ignore the missing partition and install windows on the 2.2TB anyway. During the installation process, installation crushed because of "Windows was not able to do the proparing" or sth. like that.

So, i made a deep formatting on every 3 drives (using the raid driver from before, took 3h ours per drive), deleted the raid and rejoined the drives afterwards. Back to windows 7 installation, the raid was found again - and it was already split (somehow...).
Now, windows was unable to do anything on the drive, said something about mbr problems and stuff.

Til now:
Currently, i have used a 4th drive to install windows and checked for errors while copeing files or reading. 500GB data and chkdsk didn´t found an error.
Even so, 800gb missing. I also tried installing windows from windows on the raid, but setup failed after restart.
I now want to know:

- is there a way to restore the missing part or do oyu have any clue what to do?
If not, i may send them back to get new one.

Some other system info:
AMD Phenom 955 x4 @3.8GHz
MSI R260 (6950) 2GB RAM
8GB DDR3 Corsair @1600MHz
Asus M4A89GTD Pro/USB3.0

 

[leandrodafontoura]

Why do you need to partition a RAID volume?

 

[Spectar]

Well, i could have done this afterwards, but i just wanted to have 2 partitions in case the part, where my windows is installed is infected by some virus or just needs to be erased/formatted totally. Just for lesser data lose. But it is not that necassary, if it´s a problem for a raid to do so

 

[tomatthe]

I believe that only uefi based sysboards can boot from gpt partitions which you would need to have a partition over 2tb. Most likely when you booted to the Windows cd it shows the first 2tb of the array as this is all that Windows would be able to use to install/boot from.

You could probably boot to the cd, create the 800g partition assuming that's the size you wanted to boot from. Install Windows then open up Storage manager and I believe it would then allow you to take all of the remaining space and create the partition as large as you would like, but it will give you a message stating it needs to use gpt.

 

[Branden]

three 1TB drives in RAID0, then partition? why? you're just tripling the chances of failure as opposed to if you ran 1 drive separetaly and the other two in JBOD.

you need a UEFI mobo to install an O/S on a partition larger than 2TB, that's what your "mbr" error is about.

 

[Spectar]

so, i have two questions about that:
- if i deacrease the raidsize (which is possible while creating the raid) to a size lower than 2 TB, may I be able to install the OS on that, then?
- even if i wasn´t able to install the os on the 2.2tb partition, the 800GB should have done. And it doesn´t solf the problem cause even with my windows running on a 4th drive, i have just 2TB, which are usable and inside the administrative tools (from windows), the rest amount of ~800GB are shown, but no option is avaible for that part (like it´s kinda stuck or crushed or what ever).

I may try to decrease the raid size tomorrow, but i would prever to be sure there is no physical damage on the drive, that´s what i want to clear out. If i realize sth strange later on i may have lost the give back garenty.

 

[x Heavy]

I think there is a deeper issue with Raid that is not quite clear to me.

You don't seem to trust a Raid O so, try a Raid 5, with three drives, one can fail and you can hotswap and rebuild the array. Even a 0+1 will use half your capacity to preserve (Mirror) your data.

After all of that, when you are finished install/updated windows... before anything else get another hard drive by itself with sufficient capacity and either clone or run windows backup to that hard drive. Again with the backup already as a "Non-Member" in your drives list you should be able to restore it.

No partitioning needed within raid.

New boards with UEFI will take 3 teras, older boards without (Of which there are legions....) will not.

For over a decade, I have only put windows and Games on raid o, backed everything up and placed pictures, data and videos onto a seperate stand alone hard drive or burned to CD, DVD or Blueray. It has worked for me over countless system collapses and rebuilds plus new builds with a minimum of losses.

 

[Spectar]

well, data lose is no problem for me, cause on my 1.5TB external drive is everything i need. Anyway, i could try raid 05 again, even if just to see if the error is already there.
But that reminds me to one thing:
if i delete a raid (say raid0) and i make a raid 05 out of it and erase that one back to raid0 - shouldn´t be that like formatting the drives? I wonder how there is any possibility to have some kind of wired data cluster, which is unusable. i tried decreasing the raid yesterday (from 2.99 to 2.5) and the 800GB unpartioned space (the unusable) has been decreased to 400 - which is kinda funny...

To elimate missunderstandings:
the 800 GB and 2.2TB are not partitioned. They are unpartitioned and somehow not attachable. Noramlly, i should be able to extend the raid back to 3TB, or am i wrong with that? (If i try, it give some error code like you get in STOP errors)

 

[nordlead]

You shouldn't be using Caviar Green in RAID. Have fun with the disk drives dropping out since that is a common problem with those disks. On top of that, if you wanted speed why would you buy the slowest drives made? The green disks don't spin at the same rate (somewhere between 5400-6000rpm)

What you should do is stop with the RAID nonsense and just buy a high speed 3 TB drive. It would save you the hassle and reduce the chance that it will break (1 disk vs 3 disks that can fail)

 

[x Heavy]

I am tempted to go along with Nordlead.

Green, power saving or anything like that is a liability anyway. I fear we are raising up a dumbed down generation who are tree huggers and think a few watts reduction on a 1000 wattamonster will make a significant different.

I don't know what else to tell you except find a second computer somewhere, library at school perhaps or even a university lab? and throw down some drive scrubber software onto it and make them virgin again before going back to the RAID school of hard knocks.

The entire point of raid is to gang a group of drives together like Marines on a rope and haul the data straight in and out properly fast. Much faster than any one drive can do.

The days of spinning drives are over, the greens and hybrids are the last gasp as the gurgling drowning technology is dragged under the waves of advancing SSD technology.

 

[Spectar]

I want to thank you guy´s , cause it helped a lot since yet. I may try some things out, especcially raid5 could be a good alternitive, even with the loose of writing speed. I didn´t know these drives would make trouble in raid (i never thought about that - most people were discussion about the controller).

But bought the green versions for some special reasons:
first of all, it was not because of energy saving, but for the resulting lower temeratures. My hardcase has some kind of rubber mount for holding the drives, which means that four drives have just 0.5 cm distance from each other. And my cause gets really hot in warm days, even with my 7 120/140mm coolers.
Another thing was the price. 40 Euro per drive seemed well.

But the most recent thing is the speed. Of curse, the spin rotation is the most common factor for speed. But, even the prior version of thos WD Green drives reach´s a avarge read with 110mb/s and write with 95/mb/s (tested with Cristal Disc Mark).

Besides the bug with the lost amount of space, the raid ist fast. Especcially Random access had been between 520 and 560mb/s with data between 100 and 1000MB. Just the burst was a little lower with 300mb/s.
Correct me if i´m wrong, what that values are good. And they seem to be close to real values.

But speed was what i wanted to reach. I really thought about raid 5, but i thought i will need a better raid controller for having good performances. But there are different thoughts about the sb850.

 

[Spectar]

well i tried raid05 and got very disappointed :/. Though i was able to install windows, the performance is more than worse. Using cristal disk, read got to 40mb/s, write 11mb/s
and random red write was even worse...
Increasing the test size from 100mb to 500 made it worse,worse,worse again...
With that speed, i could use one plate "four times" and i would have been faster. Anyway, it seems the drives are working correctly. Maybe my raid controller is just to bad (or the drives are really inapproporate for raids).
Thanks anyway.