Windows software RAID sucks, I give up

[Doomer]

Worst garbage feature ever to come out of Redmond. I have 2 Mirrored arrays and they are constantly going out of sync for no reason. There's nothing physically wrong with HD's as I tested them with every utility available including HD Sentinel. Usually I can manually resync them but after a power failure last night, they won't resync, they say failed redundancy. Gonna break the mirrors and come up with some sort of backup scheme. Is there any 3rd party RAID software out there that actually works?

Thanks

 

[corkyg]

Several years ago, I decided that hardware RAID was more reliable, and could be used from OS to OS. I started it with Win 95, and it keeps on keeping on through 7. It i8s not a world beater, just has 3 functions, 0, 1 and JBOD. Since I use 1, it is very solid. I have upgraded HDDs on it 3 times - never a problem. I keep the array backed up on an external drive that is always off unless being cloned.

By and large, I have always been biased towards hardware solutions./ No regrets.

Sorry I have no good software suggestion for you. I'm sure someone will show you some.

 

[mikeymikec]

Worst garbage feature ever to come out of Redmond. I have 2 Mirrored arrays and they are constantly going out of sync for no reason. There's nothing physically wrong with HD's as I tested them with every utility available including HD Sentinel. Usually I can manually resync them but after a power failure last night, they won't resync, they say failed redundancy. Gonna break the mirrors and come up with some sort of backup scheme. Is there any 3rd party RAID software out there that actually works?

Thanks

So because it didn't work for you, it's garbage? Uh-huh.

I've only used Windows RAID 2-3 times (Windows 2000 Server most of the time), and the only problems I've had with it were due to hardware issues. I'm not saying "therefore it's great", but it worked for years for me. If you want to look into the problem further, I would check the Event Viewer's system log for errors/warnings. I would also check the hardware controller's driver and look for anyone on the Internet having issues with that particular controller.

Back in the days of nforce 4 I had a wonderful time troubleshooting a system I built which would hang only during loads that the customer gave it (and only intermittently). It turned out to be nforce 4 vs. seagate and NCQ. Disabling NCQ resolved it.

 

[smitbret]

Worst garbage feature ever to come out of Redmond. I have 2 Mirrored arrays and they are constantly going out of sync for no reason. There's nothing physically wrong with HD's as I tested them with every utility available including HD Sentinel. Usually I can manually resync them but after a power failure last night, they won't resync, they say failed redundancy. Gonna break the mirrors and come up with some sort of backup scheme. Is there any 3rd party RAID software out there that actually works?

Thanks

Don't know if you are dedicated to Mirrored RAID, but if parity is good enough, then you might want to look at:

FlexRAID - www.flexRAID.com
or
unRAID - www.lime-technology.com
or
SnapRAID - http://snapraid.sourceforge.net/

I've been runnning FlexRAID for awhile without a hitch. I've also setup unRAID and it has a great track record. Never tried SnapRAID, but it's free and definitely worth a shot if RAID 1 and/or drive pooling isn't a necessity.