When an IDE raid 0 stripe breaks....

[Tripleshot]

Can you fix it? I am tired of loosing data and playing with XP and the Highpoint 370 XP controller on this POS BX133 mobo. It is got to be the most frustrating thing I have ever dealt with. I wanted Raid 0 for speed, installed supposedly the fastest starting OS out there, and I have 3 ea. 20.4 gig maxtor 7200 HDS to give meplenty of storeage. I formatted from the CD and set the C drive as less than 6 gigs. The only thing on c was the OS. I formatted the remaining partitions from within the management console of XP and the thing just locked up cold. I forced a re boot and get message stripe is broken. this has been happening too much. It did it in W2K, and 98. It did it with different cpu's and different ram. I have even swapped mobos.(i have spares just for this reason)

Is there a way to save the stripe set, since I cant find a way in the bios or at post.?

Thanks.

 

[ianbergman]

unfortunately I think you're in trouble; i ran into some similar problems a while back and there's just nothing to do when a RAID0 array fails.

However, try just formatting the whole 60GB RAID drive as a single partition. I've never had a RAID-0 array enjoy being partitioned; it causes all kinds of trouble, at least for me. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be possible or not.

Anyway, give the single partition a try - it's kind of annoying, but as soon as I did that all my troubles went away. Now I just have to hope that one of my drives doesn't fail... sigh. The troubles of a fault-intolerant setup.

 

[peto]

I was having troubles with my RAID 0 setup. I must have failed on me 5 times. One of the problems was one of my HDDs was defective. RMAed it and the array failed again, so i replaced my beat up IDE cables with some new ones, got new drivers and bios, and upgraded to XP and now it's fine. I have 4 partitions and it's been up for about 2 1/2 months.

 

[Evadman]

If raid 0 fails you are totaly out of it. No way of retrieving the data. ( without changing out the platters as a data recovery place can do ) raid 0 does not have any failsafes, and if it fails, you are SOL. sorry.

 

[Tripleshot]

Thank you . I understand fully the lost data,and fortunately I am only in the stage of building this so not much was lost. I partitioned to allow MP3 storage and I was goingto try some gaming in XP. That is as far as it got.

I have one question involving this raid set up. When in bios to set up raid,i can make a chioce of the size of blocks I want,ranging from 4 k to 64k. I was thinking maybe that might havesomething to do with it. Does the OS want a certain type of block size to operate with? What is normal default size?
I did set this up as 64k bit block size, thinking more is better,but perhaps that is not the case here.

I will re format the HDss. They areall in removable bays,so if one is failing, i can track it. They are new drives but they have been reformatted many, many times.

 

[ianbergman]

I'm also curious as to the technical details of this, if someone has them, but as far as I know-

The block size is how much data is written at a time across the stripe, so if you have lots of small files, you want a small block size, and vice versa. if it's a large file server, i think a large block/stripe size is best.

i think. someone let me know if i'm wrong here.

 

[Evadman]

<< I'm also curious as to the technical details of this, if someone has them, but as far as I know-

The block size is how much data is written at a time across the stripe, so if you have lots of small files, you want a small block size, and vice versa. if it's a large file server, i think a large block/stripe size is best.

i think. someone let me know if i'm wrong here. >>



You are exactly correct. YOu left out one thing tho. Smaller block sizes can actually slow down the array. 64k seems to work the best for all around stuff. If you want to learn more check out this Article on Raid.

 

[ianbergman]

should have known there'd be an anandtech article on RAID