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RAID Drives degrade and drop out on Intel ICH9R

M

MrCoyote

Golden Member
I have (2x)Maxtor Maxline Pro 500GB 7H500F0, and (2x)Maxtor Diamondmax 21 320GB STM3320620AS. My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-EX38-DQ6 with Intel ICH9R RAID. O/S is Vista x64. All of the drives will randomly drop out of the RAID-1 arrays whenever there is a lot of activity on them. Even if I do a DEFRAG, there is a 50% chance one drive will drop out. Then I have to do a rebuild which takes a long time! I've even tried an external Sans Digital RAID enclosure, and the drives still drop out after awhile. I went to Fry's Electronics and other stores, and everyone tells me that regular hard drives should work with onboard RAID and in enclosures. They don't even sell the WD "RAID Edition" drives.

Does anyone know if the Intel ICH9R supports the TLER function of "RAID Edition" drives or do I need to buy an add-on RAID controller?
 
There is nothing that the controller needs to support, it's internal to the drive. It's just a firmware toggle that tells the drive how long to attempt to recover a failure before giving up.

Viper GTS
 
Might go look that Maxtor up on Seagates page. They've been having issues with a firmware set causing those kinds of problems. They lead to the drives becoming unrecognizable in the BIOS eventually. I just had a Barracuda do it on me last night. your model number there looks like one of the ones having the issue at first glance. That might not be the issue you're seeing but you can check on it here.

http://seagate.custkb.com/seag...earch.jsp?DocId=207931
 
Can you control the time to wait for drives to spin up? If so that might be your problem, set it a little higher. It might help.
 
I think the idea of a fiirmware update or even overwrite of old one might help..

I have never done a HDD but lots of other hardware..
Most time you seach google for a win98 se boot disk image and make a boot disk if you dont have one and boot up with floppy dive and then place firmware disk that you copied download on to in after boot up and type DIR

It will list all the fgiles and folders and Type the name of file you need to run the update...

Just make sure its not storming as you dont want power to got uot before update is done..
 
I read a few reviews on Newegg of the Maxline drives. One person said they were having RAID problems too with the Intel ICH9R. They said to put the drives in 1.5Gb/s mode using the jumper on the drives, because they have issues with Intel and 3Gb/s. So I am trying that right now and will see how long it lasts until they degrade again.
 
Well, putting the drives in 1.5Gb/s mode didn't last long. I had a drive drop out again today. This is really irritating.
 
I would take the RAID1 off, you'll probably do better with just daily backup of your 2 drives with the other 2 drives. Or can you run RAID5?
 
Have you tried using different SATA cables?

I had the same problem, and simply using a different brand of SATA cable solved my problems.
 
I changed out the drives with a different brand and reinstalled O/S. So far running fine for a month, so it must be compatibility problem with the old drives and my board.
 
Drives that take too long to reply to the control for any reason do NOT play well with RAID controllers of any kind. Because the data is redundant, RAID controllers are basically set up to assume the worse and they will drop a drive very quickly if it is too slow to respond. That is the whole point of RAID edition drives (e.g. Seagate ES and ES.2 drives). The firmware is tuned to prevent these types of delays from occurring, so the array stays happy.
 
I heard between this forum and Hardforum that TLER is not good for Raid 0 and Raid 1. Those modes are better served with it disabled. I will try to post the source once I find it again.
 
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