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SATA RAID 10 Hard Drive Failing

C

chris338

Junior Member
I put together a computer using a Gigabyte 965p-DQ6 mb. I am using the ICH8R Raid controller which is ports 0-5 on this mb. Everything has worked well as far as software and configuration. However, I am now about to replace my 5th hard drive in a year and a half in this configuration. Why do the drives keep failing?

I had a cheap bare bones box I bought in 2001 with a 40GB drive. It cost only $300 bucks or less. That drive never failed and it is now faithfully serving as part of my Windows 2000 server. That drive lasted 7 years and is still going. These drives I'm buying are lasting only about 6 months. RAID has been great, but I wonder if it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm prepared for the drive to fail and so now they are failing. I could not have recovered if my old bare bones drive failed and it never did. Can anyone tell me what is going on? Any suggestions for cooling perhaps?

I have the drives in 4 removable bays now. I didn't when I started and that was a real pain. They're at the top of the case with lots of space around them. I don't know what else to do.

Thanks in advance for your answers.
 
what kind of powersupply do you have in your system? Have you tested the hard drives in another system to see if they were acctully failing?
 
Unfortunately, I don't have another SATA system capable of testing these drives. This is my "dream box." The other systems are all cheap eMachines, and I have a Dell laptop. They're all IDE.

I have a huge power supply in case I ever wanted to expand and get a second video card for gaming. Right now, I only have one.

Thermaltake toughpower W0103RU 600W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Certified CrossFire Certified 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply
 
5 drives in one year? Something systematic is killing your drives dude.

Either overvolted (PSU), overheated (poor ventilation) or your mobo is walking wounded (faulty ICH).
 
So, what kind of drive failures are you seeing? Will they show up in a BIOS if you connect them separately? Do they make strange noises? Are they just dropping off the array with no warning?
 
I haven't looked inside the computer for awhile, but SATA does not use the standard +5 or +12V Molex power connectors does it? How do you test the power for SATA power connectors? Can't use multi-meter wands on that. My best guess is the thing is overheating.
 
They are just dropping out of the array with no warning. I don't know about connecting them separately. My main computer is the only one with SATA.
 
I bought four WD 320GB SATA drives, and I had the worst luck with one of them dropping out of the array all the time, and another one less so. I finally gave up and stripped the array down and sold two of the drives and re-used two of them, each in seperate machines.

I decided to give it another go, and right now I have 4 x WD 500GB SATA drives instead. I don't use that machine much, It's been turned off for a month now, so I can't really give you a status report on the array.

The controller in my case was a cheap Syba brand SI 3114 PCI 4-port SATA1 controller card. I actually bought two controller cards, but swapping the controllers makes no difference.
 
It may be a software issue. I put the supposed "failed" drive back in the system last night and it rebuilt, no problem. The array is now at 100%. Go figure. Thanks for all the help! It is sincerely appreciated.
 
Are you using "server" quality drives or just off the shelf hard drives?

This is why Seagate and Western Digital make the enterprise-level drives...to make sure that the drive doesn't drop out of the array.

 
COPHawk: At this point I would gladly buy server quality drives, but I don't know what those are. If you can recommend some sata server quality drives, I'll definitely pick them up. Thanks!!
 
This is what I bought a few months ago...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16822136143

Basically, the WD RE2 or RE3, depending on your size needed and budget.

Or...the Seagate version is out there too. Basically, they are more RAID friendly...to avoid the circumstance that you are experiencing.

That being said...if you have a flaky RAID controller...better drives aren't going to help.
 
One reason drives drop out of a RAID array is that "desktop" drives have a short initialization timeout. It takes longer for an array to initialize so the drive sometimes times out, which the s/w interprets as a failure. "Enterprise" drives have a longer timeout (among other things).
 
Also, as others have said, a UPS that has "true sine wave output" (these are usually the more expensive ones), along with a new Power Supply may help, if increasing ventilation, using RAID-Certified drives, and replacing the SATA controller doesn't do the trick.
 
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