RAID5 status normal, but Windows shows "uninitialized"

[RebateMonger]

JBOD (as I understand the wikis) is essentially spanning a partition across all drives, so the user has no idea where the files are on the physical media. Hence, dead drive equals just as much recovery hassle as a standard RAID format.

Nah. There's nothing that equals the potential recovery hassle of a striped array (like RAID 0 or RAID 5).

It sucks that HighPoint Support is (based on your posts) shut down for a week. And it certainly seems odd that Windows isn't seeing an array that the RAID controller says is fine. I'm not a huge RAID 5 fan (haven't built one since 2005), but this one sounds fixable if you can get on the phone with a HighPoint person.

 

[VERTIGGO]

Unfortunately Highpoint has nothing more for me. They keep saying I need to use the software at partition-recovery.com (which is expensive) and the downloads don't even run on my computer after installation.

I'm simply submitting an RMA and trying to forget this fiasco. 1 to 1 here we come (again).

RMA comment: "Supposedly the controller worked as intended, but after a power interruption derailed a 6TB array and numerous scans found nothing, Highpoint tech had no answer except "these things happen". They wanted me to purchase software from partition-recovery.com, but the free download wouldn't even run, so I'm just going to stay away from RAID for now."

 

[RebateMonger]

That kinda' stuff is why I avoid RAID 5. Besides the obvious risks of striping, I just don't have confidence in being able to recover an array that disappears (like yours did) or otherwise glitches.

The (unfortunate) truth is that any data that's valuable needs to be on two independent hard drives (or on tape or on the Internet). Once that's accomplished, RAID (yes, yuck, even RAID 5) has its uses.

 

[Emulex]

yeah most people that use raid - like for real - always runtime their battery backup to allow a safe shutdown - and have a battery backed write cache for when that time their battery fails. double-cover your ass. then backup off-site to triple cover your ass.

if you've been around long enough you'll know that anything can/will fail. and raid-5 blows hard compared to raid-0+1 (striped mirrors)

 

[Nothinman]

Unfortunately Highpoint has nothing more for me. They keep saying I need to use the software at partition-recovery.com (which is expensive) and the downloads don't even run on my computer after installation.

I'd call this one an epic win for software RAID. Even with Windows' shitty software RAID you'd probably have an easier time recovering your array.

 

[Emulex]

hmm when i lost a windows 2003 R2 software raid it was not really recoverable. unbootable even. on either drive (raid-1).

really the answer that people do not want to hear: raid belongs in a controlled environment using controlled hard drives and a matching controller. these controllers even usually have custom firmware on the drives to work best. such an environment is temperature; crash (mostly); and power stable.

otherwise you are setting yourself up for the bomb rsync and JBOD for home or WHS or whatever else that is not-raid.

 

[VERTIGGO]

All truth I think, and the hard fact is that with redundancy, the RAID's only benefit is speed. In my case, my streaming media couldn't honestly care less about the difference between 140MBps or 200MBps.

 

[RebateMonger]

I'd call this one an epic win for software RAID. Even with Windows' shitty software RAID you'd probably have an easier time recovering your array.

One thing I always forget is that you can't boot from a Windows Software RAID 5 array. That's likely an issue for many home users, since now you need another disk (or, better, two disks in RAID 1) for a boot volume.

I've only seen one attempt to recover a Windows software RAID 5 array. The company called me at 3 am and asked for help since they thought they had recent backups...but they didn't. They spent several hundred dollars on the phone with Microsoft late that night, but MS' software-RAID people couldn't recover it, either.

They ended up sending the whole array to a data recovery house in California who said it was a two-disk failure (out of a three-disk array). These were 73 GB SCSI drives. There'd been a power glitch which might have caused it. The recovery house recovered their SQL database file at a cost of $25K.

Other than that, I've had to sit through a couple of very agonizing waits for some Windows Server software RAID 1 arrays that got unsynched. The bad thing in both cases was being low on time and not knowing if Windows was going to boot when it was finished resynching. Backups were available, but time was running out.

 

[Rifter]

Ditch the highpoint, which i hear is crap anyways and just go linux software raid. I just setup a RAID 5 array with 3 1.5TB drives and had a few problems with my linux server at first where it would lockup and require a hard reboot when transferring 50GB of data or more from a linux client(generally a really bad thing to do to a raid array is pull the plug and not let it shutdown properly) and it rebooted and rebuilt the array everytime no problems, with only data lost being what was being transferred when it died(had to reboot after a hard crash 10 times or so). I finally figured out the problem(samba) and my server has been running 24/7 for weeks now useing NFS for sharing.

 

[Nothinman]

All truth I think, and the hard fact is that with redundancy, the RAID's only benefit is speed

No, the main benefit is redundancy. The fact that the Highpoint controller you were using has extremely fragile firmware is a product specific problem. I can honestly say the only time I've seen a hardware RAID array lose an array was during a firmware upgrade. And every vendor tells you that those are scary operations.

One thing I always forget is that you can't boot from a Windows Software RAID 5 array. That's likely an issue for many home users, since now you need another disk (or, better, two disks in RAID 1) for a boot volume.

I doubt many home users would care. Just image the OS and leave it on 1 volume. If you're looking at RAID5 you've already got 3 disks so finding one more shouldn't be a problem. And worst case, Windows software RAID operates on partitions so you could leaev the OS on a partition outside of the RAID set.

Although pretty much every other software RAID implementation out there is lightyears ahead of what Windows has.

 

[VERTIGGO]

At this point I'm just too tired of dealing with configurations. If I have to have redundancy, I'm already buying twice the storage I am using, and RAID just means more is used in redundancy, or at least that it has to be taken care of, whereas simple disks can be swapped, transported and mirrored at will.

That said, thanks for all of your helpful comments. The most useful thing I could find right now is a way to access all of the hard drives quickly on my xp theater system, sort of like a freeware version of Windows 7's Libraries feature. Does this exist?