what happens when a RAID1 drive goes bad.

[adammaxwell]

I have a raid 1 (the mirrored one) and just lately my computer is freezing for 10 seconds to a minute. This is followed by a barely audible high pitch wurrr and what sounds like a seek/pickup of one of the hard drives.

Updated every driver/software I can find, even my bios.
I ran chk dsk and it found about 20 corrupt files/segments.

My question is, What happenes when one of the drives goes bad in a RAID 1 (mirrored)?. Can I just use the good drive as an ordinary IDE?.

Is there a way of getting a new drive and slotting it into the raid, essentially replacing the faulty one.

Thanks,
Sorry about the sloppynessof this post its 3am and im very tired.

 

[RichPLS]

most, if not all RAID controllers alert you if a drive fails, then you simply replace it with no data loss.
You could ignore replacing it, and yes it would work just without a safety net.

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So I got me a pen and paper And I made up my own little sign</pre><p></font color=red>

 

[Crashman]

If a drive fails, or starts having problems that indicate imenent failure, you can replace it and rebuild the array without loosing the data.

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[jim552]

Generally, a drive breaks, the RAID controller marks it as being failed, you replace the drive, and the RAID controller rebuilds the array.

In rare circumstances having a drive that is NOT working properly installed under RAID 1 can corrupt the data on the other drive.

A real obvious example, is when a consistency check is done most RAID controllers will use one drive as the primary. Data from the primary is considered correct matched to the secondary drive and copied when necessary. If the primary drive is the one having problems then the data copied can be incorrect resulting in an exact match of a corrupted drive.

In most cases drive problems now-a-days are of the "catastrophic" sort.

Generally a drive works well until it actually fails. That is NOT always true, but often it is.

If you suspect a drive is going bad, it is best to replace it with a new one and see if your problems go away.

Any RAID controller should be able to rebuild the Array if a drive fails. Just pop out the bad drive, and pop in the good one.

Generally, I prefer to be in Windows when I do this that way I don't mistype or choose the wrong drive. (It's usually just easier.) I my case though I pretty much always use removeable drive frames so I just pop out a drive and pop in a new one and the RAID card begins to rebuild.

If you don't have a removeable drive frame installed then I would rebuild the array in the RAID card BIOS. BE VERY CAREFUL to choose the correct drive to copy from, or that has been marked as FAILED. You don't want a blank drive to copy over you data.

READ your documentation carefully.

NOTE: Some RAID cards will crash or have other problems if the replacement drive has data on it. (Specifically, I have run into this problem with Promise controllers.) Make sure the replacement drive is cleared out.

NOTE: Your problem could also be a driver conflict or a problem on your motherboard, or with another PCI card. (Although other PCI card problems are extremely rare now.)

edit: Added the first paragraph to answer the orginal question





<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by jim552 on 12/06/04 02:49 PM.</EM></FONT></P>