a8n-sli, silicon image raid in raid1 questions

[karmadharma]

I finally got back my PC from the shop (new mobo, old one gave up the ghost after 2 days for some reason) and I'm wondering about something RAID related. I have two HDs in RAID-1 on the silicon image raid controller and I have two questions:

= the hd activity light in my case is nearly always 'mostly on' (by 'mostly' I mean it's as if it's blinking at low intensity very rapidly, it comes on full bright when I do something with the HDs). Is this normal? I am used to HD activity lights being completely OFF when nothing goes on.

= the 'raid group summary' in the sataraid5 java utility tells me that my configuration is 'mirrored' (which is fine) but in the status column it says 'reduced': what does this mean? is this normal?

Thanks in advance for any info you might have...

 

[Robbidoo]

I've got the same issue - It's because the raid controller is still mirroring the two disks.

If you run the Silicon Image java util, you'll see that both disks are yellow. If you then go Window -> Task Manager, you'll probably see a task labelled 'Restore Redundancy'.

On my 250GB disks this process is taking about 5 hours. The problem is that it seems to do a complete re-mirroring EVERY TIME the machine crashes, or even after I resume from standby.

I'm running the 1.1.0.0 drivers from Asus.

Has anyone found a way around this?

I can't use the nVidia RAID because the controller only recognises the drives every 2nd or 3rd boot - they're both on SATA converters.

 

[mofrack]

I have the issue of my RAID 1 array being in "reduced" status, but the array isnt rebuilding itself...

any ideas? any way that I can rebuild it without losing data?

 

[karmadharma]

I had no idea the array was actually rebuilding itself when I had all the 'reduced' issues (didn't see Robbidoo's reply at the time), in order to get things back to normal what I did was go in the BIOS, remove the array and recreate a RAID1 array with 'immediate' data copying (not sure if it's online or offline, I forget), this copied one HD over to the other and got things back to speedy again. I have to say, though, that I do have a spare HD so if things went wrong I wouldn't have been SOL. Given how cheap HDs are nowadays I definitely suggest getting another one and using that as the 'target' drive of the new RAID1 array.

 

[mofrack]

Originally posted by: karmadharma
I had no idea the array was actually rebuilding itself when I had all the 'reduced' issues (didn't see Robbidoo's reply at the time), in order to get things back to normal what I did was go in the BIOS, remove the array and recreate a RAID1 array with 'immediate' data copying (not sure if it's online or offline, I forget), this copied one HD over to the other and got things back to speedy again. I have to say, though, that I do have a spare HD so if things went wrong I wouldn't have been SOL. Given how cheap HDs are nowadays I definitely suggest getting another one and using that as the 'target' drive of the new RAID1 array.

It's offline, FYI

I did this same thing and the array is still running as reduced. Although, I think the target disk I used was the same disk I used as target when originally building the array.

I'm surprised more people don't use RAID 1, or if they do, havent seen this issue. Hmmmm.

 

[karmadharma]

I did this twice, once it was fine (and ran fast right away) and the other it was again 'reduced', in order to fix it I switched one of the HDs to a different SI port and chose 'rebuild array' in the BIOS, after that it ran fine again (wonder why!). I have to say I got the 'reduced' only twice, once when XP crashed due to the NX and once when my mobo was replaced (which might've triggered the same 'oops, system crashed, let's rebuild' behaviour in the controller).

[edit] by 'I did this twice' I meant 'I removed the array and recreated it'

 

[mofrack]

Originally posted by: Robbidoo
I've got the same issue - It's because the raid controller is still mirroring the two disks.

If you run the Silicon Image java util, you'll see that both disks are yellow. If you then go Window -> Task Manager, you'll probably see a task labelled 'Restore Redundancy'.

On my 250GB disks this process is taking about 5 hours. The problem is that it seems to do a complete re-mirroring EVERY TIME the machine crashes, or even after I resume from standby.

I'm running the 1.1.0.0 drivers from Asus.

Has anyone found a way around this?

I can't use the nVidia RAID because the controller only recognises the drives every 2nd or 3rd boot - they're both on SATA converters.

So yeah, it turns out the array was rebuilding itself, albeit slowly.

The fact that the array has to rebuild itself afer resuming from sleep is REALLY LAME!! I was confused as to why the array was having to rebuild when my machine wasnt even crashing?

Hope a fix for this comes along soon, not a lot of people using RAID 1 to comment on this...