I give up on RAID 0

[LarryJoe]

I just finished wiping things clean and reinstalling XP for about the 4th time in as many weeks. The system has been completely stable per Prime95, but it seems all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, I would reboot and my OS would be trashed, i.e. missing or corrupt files.

This weekend though, my two 1 month old 30GB/7200/ATA100 Maxtors got totally trashed and could not be formatted. XP as well as fdisk reported hard drive failures while attempting to format. I went out and bought one 40GB Maxtor yesterday and gave up on RAID. I am not too disapponted, because I would have gotten the RAID versions anyway just for the added IDE chains.

It could have been heat I guess, but I thought that modern hhd's run cool. I have a jam packed case and had the RAID 0 drives on top of each other, actually touching.

Anyone have any comments or similar experiences? Time to RMA $200 worth of drives back to Maxtor. I wonder if they will give me one 60GB for the two 30GB dead ones?

LJ

 

[MadRat]

<<It could have been heat I guess, but I thought that modern hhd's run cool. I have a jam packed case and had the RAID 0 drives on top of each other, actually touching.>>

*shakes head*

You didn't read that little pamplet that explains proper use, did ya? You have to maintain airspace and temperature range around the drives for healthy operation. You did the damage by stuffing them together without proper cooling.

 

[LarryJoe]

LOL! I guess that may be the cause, but they didn't feel too hot to the touch. I did monitor this right after I finished building the system.

 

[Eug]

1) RAID 0 is inherently risky
2) Your case is packed
3) If you're overclocking, any setup is risky
4) RAID 0 is inherently risky.

By the way, I can Prime 95 a computer and have it be stable, but that says little about overall system stability. Turn on 3D video, even underclocked, and the CPU may crash. Drop the CPU down a notch or two and keep the video the same, and it works fine. Heavily access the drives and they may become flaky, or the CPU may crash, etc.

Prime 95 alone is just a first step in testing stability. I suspect one reason is that if you have multiple things generating heat it's gonna be more problematic than just having the CPU alone generating heat like with Prime 95. Plus, with an overclocked PCI bus speed and a hot case you may not notice any disk problems until heavy usage. What I used to do was run a program like Prime 95 or dnet OGR simultaneously with a 3D game demo, overnight, to test video and CPU stability. Once I got a speed that was stable then I'd drop it down a notch, just as a safety margin. For hard drives, I've found that ANY brand of drive is more flaky over about 37 MHz PCI. I think ideally one should keep it to about 35 MHz, and 37.5 at the max, although I found with some of the older 5400 rpm Maxtor drives, even just 37.5 MHz would consistently garble the drive. (The strange thing is that some Cyrix CPU mobos have a normal PCI bus speed of 37.5 MHz, since the CPU dictates an FSB of 75 MHz.)

 

[miken]

This is a documented problem with XP. MS has admitted that fast drives will corrupt the SYSTEM and SOFTWARE files on shutdown. This is a sporadic problem, and not an easy on to diagnose unless it happens more than once. The system HIVE files become larger that 13M, thus will not load, and corrupting your files.

 

[LarryJoe]

Wow, I didn't realize that. This is exactly what is happening. Everything is fine, but then BAM, a shut down and restart comes back with a trashed OS. I wonder how common it is. But could this problem totally trash both my drives to the point of RMA?

Eug - thanks. As far as stability, I am not just relying on Prime95. I have run 3d loops and the like. I also play a fair amount of games for extended periods and all is rock solid. Also, on the bus speeds, my mobo has a fix option where I can lock in the PCI and AGP to 33mhz and 66mhz, respectively. So everything is in spec.

 

[Amused]

I'm running four WD 100GB "special edition" drives in RAID-0 with XP. (see specs for the whole system).

I've not had the "Hive missing or corrupted" except ONCE when I tried OCing my machine too high the first day I built it (that was three months ago).

What I have done is make XP flush the page file automatically on shut down. This gives a long delay (20 seconds on average) when I shut down or restart. I did this after the one time I got that error, and have aggressivly OCed my machine many times since, and have never seen the error again.

IIRC the option to automatically flush the page file on shut down can be found in Admin tasks, or in the Registry.

BTW, ALWAYS have at least passive cooling for your HDDs. I've activly cooled all my HDDs since my old 14GXP drive back in 98. I've NEVER had a HDD fail on me, and that includes 6 IBM 75GXPs and 2 IBM 60GXPs.

 

[boyRacer]

Damn 4 100GB drives ^ ... :Q ive got mine all in one cage (SX1030). But ive got a fan running in there so i guess its ok. No errors so far except for constant unwanted reboots when playing games... i think its my memory though.

 

[ahsia]

<<
1) RAID 0 is inherently risky
2) Your case is packed
3) If you're overclocking, any setup is risky
4) RAID 0 is inherently risky.
>>



I ran RAID 0 for about a year, and realize I am not gaining any advantages because of the risk I take if one of the drives happen to fail. RAID 0 is great on a workstation, but only if you really need the performance. Most people can't tell if you are just word processing or surfing on the web. I have 4 drives on 4-3.25 drive bay, but I have two fans blowing air into it. Without proper cooling, no matter great the new drives are, heat will destroy them.

IDE RAID is somewhat of a mixed bag for me. Although I like the additional feature, I don't see that advantages to running RAID 0, and RAID 1 is just a waste of a drive. I guess the only good thing is that you get 4 IDE channels.

 

[MadRat]

<<No errors so far except for constant unwanted reboots when playing games... i think its my memory though>>

...Or an NVidia videocard.

 

[Eug]

<< RAID 1 is just a waste of a drive. >>

Well, I guess it depends on how much you value data integrity. I'm not running RAID 1 because I don't have RAID at all, but if I did I would. I have a Firewire external drive who's sole purpose is to back up the other drives. It'd be simpler having RAID 1 than manually copying my filez over from time to time. It's just not an option to backup 40 GB of files to CD-R - I may get a DVD-R for this purpose. Also, RAID 1 potentially gives you increased read speeds.

 

[LarryJoe]

I thought about going RAID 1, but I didn't really see the point in mirroring a drive just for the instance of a hard drive failure. I save all my data to another drive and just use the main drive for the OS and applications. If my install of XP gets corrupted or unstable, I assume the problems are just mirrored on the other drive. In my case, I agree, RAID 1 is a waste of a drive.