Raid 5 woes

[WannabeSQ]

Ok, I have a RAID 5 on a highpoint rocketraid 454 with 4 WD2000JBs, and so far have had 2 drives fail separately, so I simply swapped out the bad drive and rebuilt the array, that's the point of pairity in raid correct? Well, not even a month after replacing one drive, 2 drives simultaneously failed, so I lost all my data (ReplayTV TV shows)

Are these drives just bad? or am I doing something wrong? They were idle at the time, then my computer hard booted, temporarily losing my boot drive, so I turned it off for the night, and checked it out this morning. When I do transfers to/from this array, it's usually off the network, so it's not like its maxing out the IO, so I don't think I was working them too hard.

Anybody have any recommendations for data recovery from the 2 good drives? And, should I bother restoring this array at all? This brings my total for this 4 drive array, to each drive failing at one point or another. First one was a click of death, as was the second.

Now as I type this, it appears the drives are OK, but no longer part of the array, I am going to attempt to reboot to see if that works.

 

[WannabeSQ]

Turns out at least one drive got corrupted, and it is rebuilding.

But still, I seem to be having more problems with this RAID than I have with my external firewire drives, all maxtors which are not in a raid, but are used about the same amount. Am I working with flakey drives or maybe a flakey controller?

 

[uOpt]

Almost the same thing happend to me. I bought three Maxtor 160 GB SATA in March and a few weeks ago two of them were failing so fast after each other that I lost some of the data on my RAID5.

But there's nothing special about RAID that would damage drives, apart from the fact that people put more drives into their computer, raising the temperature and that RAID users will probably be heavy disk I/O users.

I exchanged everything for Seagate 7000.7s and things seem more stable now.

 

[uOpt]

What kind of drives, anyway? Your problems sounds precisely as mine.

 

[Jeff7]

Any overclocking here?
I don't know that Highpoint makes any hardware-based RAID 5 cards - that is, they don't do much processing on the card, and thus rely on the CPU to do the parity calculations. Some of Promise's cards, which are larger and more expensive, do a lot of the work themselves. This might leave less room for errors to crop up.

What kind of drives, anyway? Your problems sounds precisely as mine.

Ok, I have a RAID 5 on a highpoint rocketraid 454 with 4 WD2000JBs,

Western Digital 200GB, 8MB cache, 7200rpm.

 

[CrashX]

I have built several backup servers for customers using IDE Raid5. All have 3ware Raid5 IDE controllers.
On each server, at least one drive has died. I RMAed the drive, rebuilt the array using either the utility if it's a Windows box, or in the controller's bios if it's a Linux box. But I have never lost the array or the data. 3ware is THE king of IDE Raid.

Now, the thing to know is, IDE drives up until recently, most IDE drives have not been designed to run in a 24/7 operating environment. IDE drives are much more prone to failure that SCSI drives. I have had to replace two or three WD 200JB's in a backup server because of that very reason. This doesn't mean they are a bad series of drives. But this does show that they aren't designed to be running 24/7 with GB's of traffic all the time.

The exception to this is WD recently started offering RAID edition's of some of their SATA drives, known as the SD series. These drives are actually qualified by WD to run in an always on RAID, with a MTBF of 1 Million hours. I have two of these 250GB drives in a RAID1 in my own personall server

 

[Thermalrock]

i owned so many hdds and i never had a single one fail on me. what do you guys do to them?

 

[WannabeSQ]

I figure my drives fail because I am storing large files on them, and often moving large anounts of data on and off the drives. But that is why I bought the damn raid in the first place.

Another thing that bugs me, I have my MP3 library stored on the same array with all of my video files, and it works fine, but whenever I play a song while simultaneously updating ID3 tags of multiple (sometimes when only changing one mp3, but not as noticeable) the song sputters, and skips, as if it can't read the data from the disks fast enough. I set the block size at 64k because I was unsure how I would be utilizing the raid, should I have gone higher? It's really annoying. Is there anything I can do about it?

I am seriously considering buying an SATA raid 5 to replace this, and either selling the rocketraid card and putting the drives to use elsewhere, or setting it up with the largest block size, and use it for large files only.

Would 3 Maxtor 300GB 16MB cache drives in RAID 5 do the trick for MP3? I'd get the same usable size as my 4 200GB drives, with more room to grow, because the card I am looking at (3ware) has online capacity migration.

 

[uOpt]

Originally posted by: WannabeSQ
I figure my drives fail because I am storing large files on them, and often moving large anounts of data on and off the drives.

WD drives?

There seems to be a pattern there, I rejected WD because they apparently don't really make drives for constant heavy use. Just look at that "RAID edition" joke.

Would 3 Maxtor 300GB 16MB cache drives in RAID 5 do the trick for MP3? I'd get the same usable size as my 4 200GB drives, with more room to grow, because the card I am looking at (3ware) has online capacity migration.

I had two if the three Maxtors I got in March fail and now they give warranty trouble (RMA only if you send in the code of a Windows-built bootfloppy, I don't have a machine with SATA and floppy, so I gotta call them and yell). I'd never buy Maxtor again.

I got Barracudas now and they are very good.

If you can wait just a little more you can get the 7000.8 drives which should be about perfect.