Test Hard Disk Drives in RAID1

[baumgrenze]

I have a pair of WDC WD740ADFD-00NLR5 drives running under RAID1 (Intel Rapid Storage Technology) as my boot drive. The "Storage System View" shows that my boot drive is Status: Normal.

I just ran a System Report using the Intel software and for one of the drives it reports:

SATA transfer mode: Generation 1

and for the other

SATA transfer mode: Generation 2

Does this suggest that one of the drives is failing?

I downloaded a copy of Western Digital's "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows" in 2010. My notes report Version: v1.21 but I can't see how to check this when the program is running. I find no "Help/About" to confirm this.

I've tried running it and it seems to be 'unhappy' trying to check individual drives when they are running under RAID1.

Is there another way to check these two drives short of disconnecting them one at a time and running the Data Lifeguard program?

Thanks

baumgrenze

 

[alzan]

I have a pair of WDC WD740ADFD-00NLR5 drives running under RAID1 (Intel Rapid Storage Technology) as my boot drive. The "Storage System View" shows that my boot drive is Status: Normal.

I just ran a System Report using the Intel software and for one of the drives it reports:

SATA transfer mode: Generation 1

and for the other

SATA transfer mode: Generation 2

Does this suggest that one of the drives is failing?

I downloaded a copy of Western Digital's "Data Lifeguard Diagnostic for Windows" in 2010. My notes report Version: v1.21 but I can't see how to check this when the program is running. I find no "Help/About" to confirm this.

I've tried running it and it seems to be 'unhappy' trying to check individual drives when they are running under RAID1.

Is there another way to check these two drives short of disconnecting them one at a time and running the Data Lifeguard program?

Thanks

baumgrenze

I don't think you'll be able to check them with the WD utility w/o breaking the array. I haven't used it recently but the utility doesn't make any changes to the disks, it just tests each sector and reports the findings; you could break the array, run the utility against each drive and assuming no errors you could recreate the array. I would think rebuild time would be negligible.

That being said, I'm not convinced that the system report message is indicating an error.

Found this article on sata-io.org: https://www.sata-io.org/sata-naming-guidelines

Check your motherboard manual; it should say what the internal ports and speed are rated, i.e 3Gb/sec (SATA Rev. 2) or 6Gb/sec (SATA Rev. 3)

 

[baumgrenze]

I dug through my data files and have managed to sort this out.

The original Western Digital WDC WD740ADFD-00NLR5 were SATA 1.5 Gb/s. One of mine failed after about a year of service and was replaced. The replacement was a WDC WD740ADFS-00SLR5 SATA 3.0 Gb/s drive because that was what was available at the time.

It is a tribute to the Intel RAID software that it could pair two drives with different data transfer rates without giving me regular headaches.

Sorry for the confusion.

baumgrenze

 

[alzan]

I dug through my data files and have managed to sort this out.

The original Western Digital WDC WD740ADFD-00NLR5 were SATA 1.5 Gb/s. One of mine failed after about a year of service and was replaced. The replacement was a WDC WD740ADFS-00SLR5 SATA 3.0 Gb/s drive because that was what was available at the time.

It is a tribute to the Intel RAID software that it could pair two drives with different data transfer rates without giving me regular headaches.

Sorry for the confusion.

baumgrenze

No problem.

Pairing drives with different transfer rates is just as much about the backwards compatibility features of the revisions of SATA standards and firmware as it about Intel's (or any other chipset) vendors RAID software.