RAID1 woes

[faxon]

So I had these 2 400GB 7200.10 Barracudas collecting dust in a box, and my 500GB 7200.10 Barracuda was 3/4ths full and counting. the only backup I had of the data i cared about on that drive was an external WD Essentials Edition 1TB that I keep at a friends house, so I decided to split the drive into 2 drives, one being all the apps, which i will leave on the 500GB drive, and the other being all my music and movies which i wanted to back up on a mirrored RAID volume in case one drive died, since this is the only data i really care about not loosing other than a couple game saves that arent really that important.

So, I installed the drives, went into bios and enabled raid on the 2 channels my drives were on, saved, and restarted. After POST I configured the drives into a RAID 1 volume, saved my settings, and then booted into windows. After formatting the new volume, i immediately went to copy all 211gb of data i wanted to back up. now, after about 45GB, i was in the middle of typing up a post about how smooth it all went and asking about anything to watch out for, when my comp just locked up (lol not so smooth now eh), wouldnt respond to ctrl-shift-escape (opens task manager direct in vista) or ctrl-alt-delete, alt tab, nothing, and my cursor was frozen on the screen. So I held the power button down until the comp turned off, rebooted, and tried again. after only 5 minutes the same thing happened, so i again rebooted, and waited for 20 minutes doing some browsing and what not before deciding to start copying data again. after no less than a minute, my comp hung again, and i went into bios and disabled raid, rebooted, to see both drives still there with each one as it's own mirror of what had been copied before it crashed (all 5GB worth).

now, i konw for a fact both these drives are good, as i was using them for a while in another build before i transfered over to this one, at which time i decided to condense the number of drives i was using down, since i wasnt generating a whole lot of data at the time. SMART reported no issues back before i uninstalled them and they had performance identical to that of my 500gb, which kind of makes sense since they are of the same generation of hardware. Now, when I go to check SMART in the current configuration (150GB Vraptor, 500GB and 2x400GB 7200.10 drives) using HDtune, nothing will report in the health status tab any longer, when i know for a fact that it reported before i plugged the 2 400gb drives in. so i'm thinking controller problem here. the motherboard im using is hardly a stellar board by any means, as it has seen many a crappy overclock that couldnt go any higher, on chips which went much higher on better boards. i was hoping to turn this rig into a WHS box at some point though, so making sure SMART works with more than 2 drives, and RAID doesnt run into any road bumps EVER EVER EVER are mandatory.

so anyone have any idea what might be wrong? I'm thinking controller issue, but my only other SATA box is at a friend's house until he buys a new rig since his P4 Northwood box died and he doesnt have a job right now. specs are as follows

XFX 680i LT
e5200 @ 3.2ghz @ 1.39vcore (1.36vcore CPUZ)
2x2gb Gskill + 2x1gb Crucial Ballistix 1066, clocked at 891mhz 5-5-5-15 1.8v
150GB Vraptor
500GB 7200.10 Barracuda
2x 400GB 7200.10 Barracuda
EVGA Vanilla 9800GTX
X-Fi Extreme Music
Coolermaster Real Power Pro 750w

My CPU is under a Xigmatek S-1283, NB is under a Thermalright HR-5 IFX, and SB is under an HR-5 IFX/SLI, so nothing should be overheating from stress here. I have a low speed yate cooling the hard drive mount my 3 storage drives are in, but i cant check temps since SMART wont report anything for any drive

as for the fact that my mobo sucks, i am already aware of this. i bought it used for $30 from a friend knowing full well it sucked, since i had already built a rig around it, and at the time i didnt feel like buying a new mobo. If that's what it comes to to get this system working for my file server in the future, i honestly wont give a damn though, since i just ran into a nice little road bump in that my e5200 doesnt support VT, which I just discovered I could use for doing classwork at home in my server classes, and I wont be able to get a reasonably good OC on any of the CPUs I would toss in here which support VT, not to mention the board doesnt support 45nm C2Q. Birthday is in 4 weeks as well, so I could probably get a PH2 955 as my birthday present from my parents :laugh:

 

[faxon]

so no thoughts on this? i would like to get this fixed regardless of if i get a new cpu/mobo in the next week or not anyway, so i could keep this board running my backup storage the way i was hoping to do it in 1 rig right now

 

[RebateMonger]

n.m.

 

[ch33zw1z]

things to try:

1. new cables. I know it sounds stupid, but stranger things have happened.
2. Make the 2x400GB as non-RAID disks and try to copy to the drives that way. If it still fails the same way, it may not be the controller.
3. Have a spare PSU? I had an issue about 1.5 years ago where my system was stable until I started running all the hard drives, then my 500W just couldn't keep up, my system almost always froze...but sometimes it would shutdown or reboot.
4. Kill the overclock and try again, same as the cables...stranger things have happened.
5. Last but no least, make sure you have the latest drivers and firmware. VERY important

 

[faxon]

the cables im using are brand new, but i will pick up a pair when i go into frys tomorrow to price check some things. i doubt it's that, but the drives may have been damaged somehow way back when my EVGA NF47 Ultra popped a few caps off and i had to RMA it. i had to replace the cables to get these drives to recognize but they were fine after that. im using the exact same cables as the ones i replaced them with. i have a 500W toughpower collecting dust in my closet right now in a 2600+ Athlon box. i will see if it has 2 6 pin PCI-E connectors for my 9800GTX and will test that theory out. If my PSU is on the way out, i will probably just replace it anyway since ih ave been looking at swaping it for one of the new silent pro modular PSUs or something else. as for killing the OC, that might be a bit more of a pain to do what with how much tinkering i had to do to get the board not to complain, even though the only thing not running within spec is my CPU. will knock the FSB back to 200 and see what happens.

edited to have the first 2 sentences make sense

 

[Gillbot]

Originally posted by: faxon
the cables im using are brand new, but i will pick up a pair when i go into frys tomorrow to price check some things. i doubt it's that, but the drives may have been damaged somehow way back when my EVGA NF47 Ultra popped a few caps off and i had to RMA it. i had to replace the cables to get these drives to recognize but they were fine after that. im using the exact same cables as the ones i replaced them with. i have a 500W toughpower collecting dust in my closet right now in a 2600+ Athlon box. i will see if it has 2 6 pin PCI-E connectors for my 9800GTX and will test that theory out. If my PSU is on the way out, i will probably just replace it anyway since ih ave been looking at swaping it for one of the new silent pro modular PSUs or something else. as for killing the OC, that might be a bit more of a pain to do what with how much tinkering i had to do to get the board not to complain, even though the only thing not running within spec is my CPU. will knock the FSB back to 200 and see what happens.

edited to have the first 2 sentences make sense

Never assume they are good because they are "new". I've gotten many bad cables fresh out of the package.

 

[faxon]

arg i was typing a response while copying data to one of the 2 drives individually and before i was done finishing my second paragraph the system completely froze. before that, i was able to get into CMD when firefox and all my other apps hung, and use tskill explorer to try and stop the file transfer, which has worked in the past, but i was unable to regain system responsiveness and had to use the power button to reboot the system. testing the other hard drive now to see if i get the same behavior out of it.

ed: from the looks of it, it's isolated to a single drive. im 50% of the way through copying 95gb of music to the drive that hasnt hung the system yet. i will swap SATA cables after it all copies and see if the problem replicates itself, and after that i will swap power connectors, and then unplug one after and my testing should be done by then hopefully. i already knocked my OC back to 2.5ghz stock so that wasnt the problem

 

[faxon]

so i isolated the problem to a single SATA channel/cable before i got the go ahead to pick up a UD3P and Q9650. i also think it was my fault. i kind of accidentally left my neddle nose pliers under my motherboard after i installed new northbridge and southbridge coolers to make the system shorter, and i probably shorted something in the process to cause problems, since the guy i got the board from was using all 6 channels before without issue. will test it again after i finish reinstalling vista with the new mobo and CPU. dont have time to do any extra troubleshooting right now though with midterms coming up and my needing to get this rig up with 4 separate instances of enterprise server 2008 in virtual PC.

 

[Shmee]

lol, good that you got it figured out. I doubt the pliers would make this happen, seems more like it would be an age issue or sata connector issue(something got broken or bent from a pull w/e)

 

[faxon]

yea you did have a ton of drives running in it for a long time. maybe your cat tried to upgrade the ICH? :laugh: