Having odd issue with new Raid 5 setup on my HTPC

[Creig]

It's been quite awhile since I've used a RAID setup of any type, but am attempting to use it with my HTPC setup:

ECS A885GM-A2 motherboard (AMD 850 SB)
AMD Phenom II x4 955 3.2 GHz
8GB RAM
RocketRAID 620 add-in two-port SATA card
Kingston V100 64GB SSD for OS
LG Combo HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive
Three 2TB SATA drives for initial RAID-5
Two 2TB SATA drives for current movie collection
Windows 7 Home Premium

I haven't had any issues running my HTPC movie collection from my current pair of 2TB drives. I eventually ran out of space and decided that if I was going to add more drives that I would like a little security built in. Since my motherboard has the SB850 chipset, it supports RAID5. So I picked up three more 2TB drives which would double my collection size since one of the drives would be used for parity. And here's where I've run into a hiccup.

Since my motherboard has only 5 SATA headers, I picked up an add-in bootable PCI-E RocketRAID card with 2 SATA ports and put the 64GB OS SSD and the optical drive on it. The five 2TB drives were then attached to the motherboard's built-in SATA connectors. No issues so far. The system boots up just fine from the SSD on the add-on card.

This next part is from memory, so it may not be totally correct but should be pretty close. I believe I went into the motherboard BIOS and set the SATA to RAID. I then entered the RAID BIOS and set up the three empty drives as a RAID-5 array on ports 0, 1 & 2. The two drives containing my movies are on ports 3 & 4. I booted into windows and installed the AMD RaidXPERT software and selected my three empty drives and set them up as my Raid-5 array. I exited out of that, went into the Windows Disk Manager, formatted my array (which took about a day) and thought I was done. After the array was formatted, I copied my movie collection over to the array to allow me to test the new RAID5 setup for stability. My plan was to eventually reformat my original pair of 2TB drives and add them to the RAID5 array.

HOWEVER... After being up for about 2 days and having no issues whatsoever, I came home and found that Windows would no longer recognize the array. Going into the Disk Manager, windows told me my array was unallocated and that I would have to choose either MBR or GPT to initialize the array. I rebooted several times with no change. Assuming that something had gone wrong, I re-initialized the array and naturally I now had a blank array. So I reformatted the array, got it all set back up again, re-copied all my data back over to the array and it was fine again.

For about two days.

Now windows is again telling me the space is unallocated and that I need to initialize the array. The drives still show up in the Raid BIOS as an array, RaidXpert still shows all three linked as an array and even still displays the volume name I assigned it. So I assume my data is still intact. But the Windows Disk Manager insists it doesn't recognize the array.

Any ideas what's going on here?

 

[Binky]

Damn, that's a lot of drives in the HTPC box. I went the server route and I love it. I assume your HTPC is in an enclosed cabinet or otherwise shielded from people's ears.

I don't know squat about raid so I can't help with you issue specifically, but I'm wondering why you didn't go with one of the commercial software raid options, like drivepool or flexraid. There are several others, and many linux-based options to build a small server with a free OS. I went the drivepool route on WHS2011, primarily because I'm cheap, lazy, and impatient. So far drivepool has been great.

Issues like what you're seeing are the reason I stayed away from hardware raid.

 

[beginner99]

for home use, don't bother with raid. Just do proper back ups and and use the drives as normal drives. raid is for up-time which does not matter in home use.

 

[Creig]

Damn, that's a lot of drives in the HTPC box. I went the server route and I love it. I assume your HTPC is in an enclosed cabinet or otherwise shielded from people's ears.

The drives are in an nMEDIAPC 6000b enclosure. I can't even hear the drives from my couch. These newer drives are MUCH quieter than their older ancestors. Plus, they're 5400 RPM, not 7200 RPM since I don't need lightning fast access times. I just need gobs and gobs of storage space.

 

[Creig]

for home use, don't bother with raid. Just do proper back ups and and use the drives as normal drives. raid is for up-time which does not matter in home use.

How do you back up 4+ TB of files without buying another 4+ TB worth of drives? The reason I decided to try Raid 5 is that I can have at least some level of protection from drive failure. If I just keep my movie collection in a non-Raid configuration and a drive dies, I've just lost 2TB worth of data. Then I'll have to go through my collection, figure out which movies were lost and re-rip them. I'd prefer not to have to do that.

A Raid 5 setup would at least give me a chance that if one drive were to fail, I could simply replace it and let the system rebuild the data on its own. I realize that Raid 5 is more for enterprise situations, but I hope you can see why I am trying to go down that route for my HTPC. None of the data on the array is going to be "mission critical", so I don't need to have a mirror set up off-site. I would just like to have a small security blanket that would allow my setup to continue should one drive fail.

 

[MarkLuvsCS]

Flexraid may be a good idea: http://www.flexraid.com/

It runs on top of the OS, so you can keep all programs stuff untouched. Seems to allow you to pool drives, and use a parity configuration, but the drives still individually store files so at least if a drive failed and u were rebuilding the array with parity if another failure occurred the worst case would be a single drive's worth. It seems to be flexible enough to just add more drives to keep expanding the pool.

I haven't used it personally, but I've been looking into this solution for a friend.

*EDIT* thread with some more info about it: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=140410

 

[Creig]

FlexRaid seems like an interesting bit of software. It's similar to Raid 5, but doesn't appear to stripe across the drives. Instead, it looks like there's a dedicated parity drive. So only the drive that has the data you're accessing (and the parity drive) need to spin up. Other than that, though, it doesn't seem to offer a whole lot over Raid 5. It has a fault tolerance of 2 vs 1 for Raid 5, but the odds of me completely losing two lightly used drives simultaneously seems remote.

Thanks for the suggestions, but I think I would still prefer to try and get Raid 5 working properly. After all, it's built into the southbridge, therefore it should be able to work properly. Especially on an HTPC which will have a minimum of extra programs installed on top of Win7.

 

[SolMiester]

What are the 3 new drivers?, green?, could be TLER timing out on the array!