RAID 1 data corruption problem help needed

phatrabt

Senior member
Jan 28, 2004
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0
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Hi all! I'm having a problem with my RAID setup and I need some advice. Here are the

specs:

Windows Server 2003 Standard
AMD Athlon 2100
Soyo SYK7V Dragon Plus MB
512MB Kingston Value RAM (I think)
10GB WD HD

That's the base system. Here's the storage system:

Syba PCI hardware RAID controller card (based on the SIL0680 2-port PATA card)
Two Seagate 7200RPM 300GB PATA drives (matched set)
PCI USB\Firewire card (to back up RAID array to external USB drive)

The storage system is set up in a RAID 1 config. Drives have passed SMART tests and

SeaTools tests. All drivers are newest ones available.

Now the problem. I was making a backup of my main system the other day and the backup failed by saying the image was corrupted. I started troubleshooting and found that I could read files from the RAID array with no issues but when writing a large file to
it it would corrupt the file (this was checked via MD5 hashes). I could not format the array in Windows (received an error) but I was able to format the drives after breaking the array and formatting them separately. I recreated the array and readded the drives, and during this process I found that when the Secondary Master was offline I write to the array with no corruption issues. I tested and confirmed this and at that point thought it was a bad drive. I then re-built the array with the Primary Master and the corruption was present. Wanting to be sure, I then removed the Secondary Master and tried the write test and found that I the corruption was not present there! I then re-added the Secondary Master and the corruption re-appeared.

My question is this: Can the RAID card go bad and cause this kind of corruption? Meaning that if the card only writes to one disk in the array there is no corruption but if both disks are in the array the data is corrupted?

Any help\suggestions anyone may have would be greatly appreciated!
 

Captante

Lifer
Oct 20, 2003
30,356
10,883
136
Its possible one of the drives is failing & causing the data corruption, but I'd say the first thing you need to check is the memory... I suggest running Memtest to see if your RAM is failing before you do anything else, that could cause the problem you seem to be having, bad data being written to the drive.