Random boot failure on RAID hardrive

[Carfax83]

I have two brand new Western Digital 600GB Raptors in RAID 0 on a Gigabyte UD5 (using Intel RAID), and I've been noticing lately that I'll get a boot failure on one of the drives sporadically..

It doesn't occur often thankfully (the last one I had was about 2 weeks ago and I had another one today), but I really want to know what could be causing this problem.

Shutting down the computer and then powering it up again fixes the problem, and I'm able to boot into Windows as usual..

I don't think the drives are failing as they're brand new, but you never know 😕

 

[Emulex]

i still recommend using hardware raid. it does a more thorough spin up cycle

 

[Carfax83]

Um, so you're suggesting my problems might be due to not having a thorough spin up cycle? 😕

 

[Emulex]

yeah my bios has delay timer seconds that you can add

 

[Railgun]

By default, I don't think many, if any, have anything longer than five seconds, which is plenty of time to spin up drives.

I've had a couple of instances like this (HW based) which was attributed to a not quite secure physical connection.

 

[Carfax83]

I had the delay timer at 3 seconds, and now I set it to 5 so that should help 😉

Funny thing though, I never got a boot failure at any time on my previous Caviar black drivers, of which I had 3 in RAID.

I guess the faster RPM on the Raptors probably needs more time to get up to speed then or some such..