Reviews:
 ·AT&T U-Verse
 ·Bright House
| WD Velociraptors.... When I purchased my Alienware Area-51 in late November I got the cheapest harddrive offered with it. As soon as Dell delivered the system, and I verified it worked, I tore it out and installed to 300GB Raptors running Raid-1 (Mirroring). I wasn't concerned about the speed increase of Raid-0, and I couldn't afford Raid-5.
This setup has been stunning. The i7-920 clocked to 3.5GHz, 9GB RAM, 5870's in CrossFire and 10K harddrives haven't so much as stuttered... until Friday. When I rebooted the system my raid controller looked odd, but it passed by too quickly to read. Then, in Win7, showed that port-1 had failed.
Is it common for these things to flake out like that? I know the older Raptors had some issues, but I thought that was fixed. Maybe I just got a bad drive? In any case, I have an "advanced replacement" coming from WD. They're shipping me a new drive, and then I have to ship the old one back. For this option they preauthorized $320 on a credit card tho. |
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 koitsuPremium,MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
kudos:14 | The problem could be any of the following:
* SATA port has gone bad or controller circuitry has begun to fail
* Power cable has gone bad or been jostled loose
* SATA cables have gone bad or been jostled loose
* Drive failure
* SMART on drive is returning overall health status failure causing your controller and/or OS driver to mark the disk as offline
If you're running a 32-bit Windows OS, you can hook the "bad drive" up to a non-RAIDed and non-ACHI port and get me SMART stats using smartmontools. Please don't use any other utility unless you're running a 64-bit OS, in which case HD Tune would be sufficient.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer. |
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| reply to weaseled386
Did you try to reactivate the disk in the array? That may be all you need to do.
Raid-1 is a good thing for Raptors. I've owned 4 of different flavors and all have failed. |
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 JahntassaWhat, I can have feathersPremium
join:2006-04-14
Conway, SC
kudos:4 | reply to weaseled386
I've had plenty of Raptors fail. The older 150/74Gb generations. Usually, though, the replacements last much longer than the original purchases. |
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| reply to weaseled386
mmmmk, I'd like to know why this was moved to the modding/oc'ing forum.
Anyways, I checked out HD Tune. I don't see how I can test one drive in it. The only option is to test the volume. |
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| reply to weaseled386
said by weaseled386:The i7-920 clocked to 3.5GHz, 9GB RAM, 5870's in CrossFire and 10K harddrives haven't so much as stuttered... until Friday. When I rebooted the system my raid controller looked odd, but it passed by too quickly to read. Then, in Win7, showed that port-1 had failed.
Because you have your CPU overclocked. And overclocking has been known to cause problems with systems whether it be the OS or hardware. So your overclocked CPU could be causing the problem even though it was running stable for a length of time.
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Here's To You |
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koitsuPremium,MVM
join:2002-07-16
Mountain View, CA
kudos:14 | reply to weaseled386
said by weaseled386:mmmmk, I'd like to know why this was moved to the modding/oc'ing forum. Anyways, I checked out HD Tune. I don't see how I can test one drive in it. The only option is to test the volume. This is with the drive still attached to the RAID controller (or if an on-board controller, then the controller configured for RAID mode), correct?
If so -- I already covered that.  All I need to see are SMART stats in full for the drive. You don't need to run any sort of test; just run the utility, pick the drive, click the Health tab, click the "Copy data to clipboard" icon, then paste into Notepad or here on the forum in a {code} (replace {} with brackets instead) block.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer. |
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Reviews:
·AT&T U-Verse
·Bright House
| reply to weaseled386
Sorry it took so long to respond back to this. Using the replacement drive, my system has rebuilt my RAID-1.
Dating back 30-45 days the system would rebuild the RAID at random times. I thought it may have been some sort of power off bug or something, and never thought twice about it. Then, finally, the drive attached to port-1 died. The sytem could see and ID it, but it showed it as failed.
When I received the new drive I attached it to the same port as the old. I tried to rebuild the volume three times, and each time it would fail the rebuild process at different times! Each time it would say the entire volume had died. (Including the known good drive.)
Finally, I hooked the replacement drive to port-4. The volume rebuilt itself in one sweep. I plan to convert to RAID-5, and will try to use what is thought to be the bad drive. I'll also troubleshoot that drive, as suggested above, this coming week. |
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| reply to weaseled386
you should have just gone with an SSD and a storage drive and/or external backup. w7 has very good scheduled backup program built in and a single decent SSD will destroy even raid-0 v-raptors, let alone raid-1.
raid 1 raptors is silly. if you're gonna spend $500 on 'fast' hard drives, you could have bought less failure-prone drives for raid-0 and then scheduled daily/weekly backups to a 3rd drive. or, like i said, a $300 SSD and 2 mechanical storage drives for raid-1 or storage and backup.
glad you got the issue resolved, though
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Somnambulator - t3h 5133pw41k3r
~Choosy moms choose Jif~ |
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Reviews:
·AT&T U-Verse
·Bright House
| Thanks for your opinions, but SSD wasn't (and still isn't) a technology I'll be using in the near future. I've ran RAID1 on high end home systems for years... ever since I had a RAID0 die and take a good chunk of my info with it. (Had backup, but it was like 2-3 weeks old.)
I've read all the debates about SSD's, and I'm not saying there is anything wrong with the technology. What I'm saying is this isn't the thread to debate them, when my decision -- and this topic -- is about WD Raptors.
As for the harddrive, I had to send it back. I looked at the RMA date, and I was getting dangerously close to the 30 day window. So I had to box it up and ship it back without further testing. |
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 imtim83Premium
join:2001-06-03
Kenner, LA | reply to Somnambul33t
said by Somnambul33t:you should have just gone with an SSD and a storage drive and/or external backup. w7 has very good scheduled backup program built in and a single decent SSD will destroy even raid-0 v-raptors, let alone raid-1. raid 1 raptors is silly. if you're gonna spend $500 on 'fast' hard drives, you could have bought less failure-prone drives for raid-0 and then scheduled daily/weekly backups to a 3rd drive. or, like i said, a $300 SSD and 2 mechanical storage drives for raid-1 or storage and backup. glad you got the issue resolved, though SSD is ok but it is not as fast as I wanted it to be! I have a 80 GB Intel SSD and it is quicker when booting up my pc, loading game levels and applications but that is about it. I won't be buying a new SSD anytime soon. Just not worth it in my opinion.
My Western Digital Raptor is not that much slower. |
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 PhoenixDown-- Wants FIOSPremium
join:2003-06-08
Fresh Meadows, NY
kudos:1 | reply to Somnambul33t
said by Somnambul33t: w7 has very good scheduled backup program built in and a single decent SSD will destroy even raid-0 v-raptors, let alone raid-1. Considering how cheap NAS and WD Green drives are, this would be a good idea for you to consider. If you get a virus or something else goes wrong, you could pick the point you want to restore from if you did it right.
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~ Insert a Funny Sig Here ~ |
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Reviews:
·AT&T U-Verse
·Bright House
1 edit | said by PhoenixDown:said by Somnambul33t: w7 has very good scheduled backup program built in and a single decent SSD will destroy even raid-0 v-raptors, let alone raid-1. Considering how cheap NAS and WD Green drives are, this would be a good idea for you to consider. If you get a virus or something else goes wrong, you could pick the point you want to restore from if you did it right. For about two years now I've been using a Synology CS-407e. The first volume is 250GB (RAID1) and houses my digital pictures and music. I only have ~10GB left and threw two Seagate 1TB drives in (RAID1 again). This NAS, at least with the firmware I was running when I bought the drives, didn't support the WD greens  I love this thing because its an HTTP/FTP server too! It slows to a crawl when 3+ people get on it tho.... |
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