Repeated RAID5 Degredation

[JohnVM]

Hey Guys,

I bought 6 500GB Spinpoint drives about a month ago, and I've been having a hell of a time getting them to work in a RAID5 properly. I set them all up in a RAID5 (so 2.5TB RAID5) on Windows 2003 x64 -- it's a GPT disk (as it's greater htan 2TB volume). I have about 500 gigs of data that I'm trying to import onto that volume from another 500 gig drive, and after a few hundred gigs, every time, it shows one of the disks in the RAID as failed. It seems to be a different disk every time - I've had at least 4 of the 6 disks show up failed at different itmes already. So, I either have to re-create the RAID volume and start over, or mark the drive as normal and let it rebuild the RAID volume, which takes upwards of 20 hours every time.

I'm using the onboard RAID controller on my GIGABYTE P35 DQ6 mobo -- Intel ICH9R raid controller.

What the h*ll is going on? I can't possibly have 4+ bad disks out of six. These came packed great, brand new, from newegg under a month ago, and I've had these problems from the get-go. I initially thought I had some screwed up/conflicting drivers or whatnot, so I formatted and reinstalled windows, and ran only 4 of them in a RAID0. Suprisingly, I got the data in just fine and it worked, that time.

But I didn't want only a 2TB RAID0, I wanted a 2.5TB RAID5, so I tried toa dd the remaining disks and it f*cked up. I had to recreate the volume. Then I tried again, and again after numerous gigs of data is imported, it shows a drive as failed. Again, if I just mark the drive as normal and let it rebuild, the drive seems to be fine.

This is becoming infuriating and I am totally lost as to what could be causing this.

ANY ideas?

thx.

 

[Acanthus]

Do you have all of the drives stacked directly on top of each other?

They *CAN* overheat if so.

 

[JohnVM]

4 of them are stacked ontop of eachother, and then 2 more are seperate. thats a good point. the fan pointing on them isnt powered on i dont think. i will look into that.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I had issues similar to this (albeit it was on a hardware RAID controller & not mobo RAID), and it was due to the PSU being underpowered for the system. Any chance we can get a list of your machines specs?

 

[JohnVM]

I have an Antec P190 case, which has 2 power supplies in it (650W and 550W respectively). 7800GTS gfx card, Q6600 mobo, 4GB DDR2, Gigabyte P35 DQ6 board, 6x500GB SATA in RAID, 1x500GB SATA + 2x400GB IDE running just as normal disks, and a 74GB Raptor OS drive.

Given I have 1200W of power I'd be somewhat surprised if it was a power issue. Granted, I might not have the power balanced properly amongst the 2 PSU's just right (I took little care in attempting to balance the power).

How much power would that hardware config use? I'm quite certain at the very least the gfx card is on a diff PSU from the hdds.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: JohnVM
I have an Antec P190 case, which has 2 power supplies in it (650W and 550W respectively). 7800GTS gfx card, Q6600 mobo, 4GB DDR2, Gigabyte P35 DQ6 board, 6x500GB SATA in RAID, 1x500GB SATA + 2x400GB IDE running just as normal disks, and a 74GB Raptor OS drive.

Given I have 1200W of power I'd be somewhat surprised if it was a power issue. Granted, I might not have the power balanced properly amongst the 2 PSU's just right (I took little care in attempting to balance the power).

How much power would that hardware config use? I'm quite certain at the very least the gfx card is on a diff PSU from the hdds.

Okay, you should be fine. I have 7 SATA hard drives, a E6400, 2gb DDR, a hardware RAID controller (PCIe), 8800 GTS all powered on a Seasonic 620w. So you should be fine on power.

 

[yuppiejr]

If your case layout is similar to my P182 and we're talking about the bottom chamber 4-drive bay I'd say running the corresponding fan is an absolute must... I'm surprised you haven't killed a drive yet considering how much heat must be building up in the dead air space when you are running all 4 drives hot and heavy during a file copy.

 

[JohnVM]

Yep, that's the bay. I hadn't been running the fan for the past ~25 days, but I turned it on last night, on high, and even with that, the RAID still degraded. The chamber holds 4 drives vertically, like this:

[drive] [drive] [drive] [drive]

I moved the middle two out, so it's just this now:

[drive] [empty] [empty] [drive]

so that the drives are seperated physically as much as possible, and I have the 2 that were in the middle down there just lying on their side (vertically),c onnected but unmoutned, in the 5.25" bay. I'm trying to figure out what 3.5" <> 5.25" mount to get for them, preferably with some cooling. Any suggestions?

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: JohnVM
Yep, that's the bay. I hadn't been running the fan for the past ~25 days, but I turned it on last night, on high, and even with that, the RAID still degraded. The chamber holds 4 drives vertically, like this:

[drive] [drive] [drive] [drive]

I moved the middle two out, so it's just this now:

[drive] [empty] [empty] [drive]

so that the drives are seperated physically as much as possible, and I have the 2 that were in the middle down there just lying on their side (vertically),c onnected but unmoutned, in the 5.25" bay. I'm trying to figure out what 3.5" <> 5.25" mount to get for them, preferably with some cooling. Any suggestions?

Does the file copy fly with the current configuration (with the 2 drives out of the bay and sitting upright in the bottom of the case)? Id worry about a more permanent solution after making sure you know whats going on.

Im not 100% sure its heat yet.

 

[JohnVM]

yeah the file copy and other operations so far have worked very well with the drives seperated like this. I've copied 900GB already so far. This is the most stable they've been yet.

I think your overheating idea is the potentially the right one - earlier when they were together i felt them and they were VERY hot.

This clearly is not a permanent solution. Also, I set the drives up in RAID0 rather than RAID5, as I felt the initial drive initialization when I created the RAID5 might overheat the drives (as it copies 1 drive worth of blank bits, like a dumbass, across the rest of the drives for 8 hrs straight).

So yeah, it's definitely not a permanent solution. I'd like to figure out some way to mount these drives properly in the 5.25" bays or elsewhere, preferably with cooling. Also, I'll probably try a RAID5 with this setup next.

 

[Acanthus]

Originally posted by: JohnVM
yeah the file copy and other operations so far have worked very well with the drives seperated like this. I've copied 900GB already so far. This is the most stable they've been yet.

I think your overheating idea is the potentially the right one - earlier when they were together i felt them and they were VERY hot.

This clearly is not a permanent solution. Also, I set the drives up in RAID0 rather than RAID5, as I felt the initial drive initialization when I created the RAID5 might overheat the drives (as it copies 1 drive worth of blank bits, like a dumbass, across the rest of the drives for 8 hrs straight).

So yeah, it's definitely not a permanent solution. I'd like to figure out some way to mount these drives properly in the 5.25" bays or elsewhere, preferably with cooling. Also, I'll probably try a RAID5 with this setup next.

The only reason i had the hunch on heat was ive had the exact same issue before with a large software raid 0 array.

Glad we figured it out

There should be some cheap brackets to mount them to 5 1/4" bays, hell if you have some rubber washers you can simply mount the drives on one side of the bay, it doesnt hurt anything.