Topic 'Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health' in forum 'Computer Hardware Help' - dslreports.com

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 20:21:07 EDT

norwegian posted :

I'd tell you if I could find a copy of my mobo manual. It got lost/thrown out and there seems to be no copies of it online anywhere (EVGA x58 SLI - # 132-BL-E758-TR).

I think from what I've read the 132-BL-E758 spec are close enough. This can be sourced from the site.
The A1 has lifetime warranty, the TR has a limited warranty.

Have you tried discussing with support on whether they have an archive of the specs manual?
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 11:09:26 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : I'd tell you if I could find a copy of my mobo manual. It got lost/thrown out and there seems to be no copies of it online anywhere (EVGA x58 SLI - # 132-BL-E758-TR).

I do know that only a couple of the SATA ports go to the JMicron controller, because initially it didn't see both 750s until I swapped around the SATA ports.

I do know the other drives are not limited to 133 MBps as the SSD can hit 200+.
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 22:24:31 EDT

koitsu posted : Yep, don't have a good 100% certain explanation for that one -- sorry. I'd love to say something like "stripe size too big or too small?" but that's really grasping at straws (most pick 128KBytes, some 64KBytes, some 256KBytes).

Is the JMicron chip wired to the PCIe or PCI bus? (I'm not sure how to determine this using Windows) I ask because 32-bit PCI is limited to 133MBytes/second.

I guess it could be a "driver quirk" or some other nonsense, but I tend to avoid JMicron controllers like the plague anyway. Unless you can figure it out, I'll just add this to my list of reasons to avoid them.

At least you know your disks are good and won't give you CRC errors. :-)
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:06:12 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : There's gotta be something wrong with the JMicron Raid controller. Got ~120 MBps read out of the new array as well.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:26:19 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : I'm amazed they shipped them both next-day-air. I was only on the phone with them yesterday afternoon about the second drive!

The only part that sucks is that both replacement drives have a limited warranty through 2/2013, even though the original drives were covered through 3/2014. Oh well, a small price to pay. And best case scenario, I don't need to use the warranty.
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 16:13:02 EDT

koitsu posted : Both drives look good/clean, no anomalies. :-)

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 15:49:22 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : And the second one. Looks like I am good to go!

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 11:52:35 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : First WD7502AAEX arrived today. Zeroing now.

On an unrelated note, I've realized that when I built my desktop over 3 years ago, my cable management was atrocious. I'll be pulling everything apart this weekend. Expect cringe-worthy before/after pics!
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 10:17:36 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : Looks like they're sending me a second WD7502AAEX in return for my second WD6401AALS! Probably the best warranty support experience I have had! EVGA is second place.

»[Rave] Western Digital warranty support
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 09:23:19 EDT

Krisnatharok posted :

said by koitsu:

Your best choice of action might be be to purchase a new WD7502AAEX (thus you'd have 2 of them for your array) and sell the WD6401AALS on eBay or similar.

I'm trying to hash it out with their tech support right now. The cost of a second WD7502AAEX is prohibitive--trying to see if they'll take the second 640 back: »www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a···22136794
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 20:14:13 EDT

koitsu posted : *chuckles* And I forgot to mention another aspect to this whole thing:

What good are3 or 5-year warranties if the manufacturer isn't going to still stock (or make!) that model of drive in 2 years? I guess it means you get a replacement product without having to pay anything, true, but if that product isn't identical to what you got, and you need an identical product given the environment...

Yeah, ponder that a bit.

It makes me wonder what WD is going to do with their next version/model of WD Red drives, since they're explicitly intended for NAS use (thus RAID).

I know how other vendors (specifically Sun and NetApp) have dealt with this -- they actually provide you with a drive that may be a "newer version" (sans physical sector size -- that must always match) but has the LBA count/capacity in the HPA region of the drive adjusted to match your existing drive/setup. Firmware differences on the other hand I'm not sure how they deal with; NetApp I imagine has an entire group dedicated to dealing with this kind of situation.

Anyway, all of this also makes me wonder a bit if it isn't a "ploy" to get people to have to buy new drives/spend more money when they shouldn't actually need to. Which leads me to:

Your best choice of action might be be to purchase a new WD7502AAEX (thus you'd have 2 of them for your array) and sell the WD6401AALS on eBay or similar.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 19:45:44 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : So they just added a WD7502AAEX to my WD account.

Sigh.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:40:05 EDT

koitsu posted : Yep that sounds like the proper choice of action here, based on whatever they send you. Be sure to follow up in the thread with whatever happens -- I'm always interested.

On the bright side, whatever drive they send you will probably perform better, even if it's the same model. :-)
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:37:54 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : OK, well the cat is out of the bag as I already submitted the advance RMA case to their site and mentioned it was part of my RAID array in the details.

Worst case scenario, I RMA the first drive and get X in return. If it doesn't match what I have, I RMA the second older drive under warranty as well and say "I told you it was in RAID 0, and you sent me a different drive as replacement. This one is under warranty too, so have it."

I'll find out shortly how good their customer service is.

Edit:

said by koitsu:

what worries me is that if you answer yes they'll take you through a bunch of rigmarole insisting that "because the drives are in RAID there's no way to test them, blah blah blah"

They can try, but I seem to have preempted that by taking the drives out RAID, zeroing each of them, and capturing before/after SMART data (which I uploaded to the Advanced RMA Case for the bad drive).
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:31:43 EDT

koitsu posted : 1. Exactly. (Wow, thank god, someone who understands! :-) )

2nd question: there will be no issues as long as they give you the same model of drive -- or more importantly, a drive with the same LBA/sector count and the same physical sector size (512 vs 4096). In recent days (past year), most of my RMAs have resulted in WD sending me a different model of drive, ex: RMAing a WD1001FALS got me a WD1002FAEX (LBA counts are the same so no issues). However, in one case (RMAing a WD2002FAEX), they "no longer had this drive in stock" and insisted they send me a different model. I ended up with a WD2003FYYS.

This may be why they ask the "is the drive part of a RAID array" question on the phone -- but that's such a sleazy question. They'll ask you this on WD Green and "non-RAID-permitted" (whatever) drive models, and if you answer yes, they basically tell you to sod off. The Blacks are permitted to be in RAID; what worries me is that if you answer yes they'll take you through a bunch of rigmarole insisting that "because the drives are in RAID there's no way to test them, blah blah blah". This is why I always answer no to the question. On the other hand, possibly saying yes means that WD then knows they HAVE to give you a drive with the same LBA count and sector size.

See what I mean about the conundrum?

So just make sure whatever drive they want to send you has the same LBA count and uses the same sector size. If they tell you a model number on the phone, you can ask them what the physical sector size is, or what the LBA count is, and make sure it matches your current drive. If they match, you're fine.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:57:02 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : One last question, will there be any issues with running the good drive with a fresh one I get out of the RMA? Or do I need to return both of them to stay in RAID 0?
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:44:09 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : So just so I completely understand, zeroing the drive prompted it to look at its sectors, and whereas 11 were confirmed bad and taken offline and 18 were suspect, it found 1 out of 18 that were bad, which is why (C6) Offline Uncorrectable is showing a value of 12 after the zeroing?
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:35:53 EDT

koitsu posted : Ahh yes, you got lucky with the 5-year-warranty then! :-) Great!

Yeah, RMA that drive that had the sector anomalies. I don't think it's necessarily in "awful" shape, but you definitely want healthy drives when being used in a RAID 0 array. I recommend you do the Advanced RMA, that way WD sends you a drive first and gives you 30 days to return the bad one.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:23:13 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : Sorry about the plethora of screenshots. I took three pictures of each drive before and after zeroing, as well as speed tests of the Samsung I am using for backup, my OCZ boot drive, and then the fresh RAID 0 array after I put the two Caviar Blacks back into raid.

Both of the WD6401AALS drives are covered under warranty until March 2014 (bought when WD was still offering a 5 year warranty on them).

The computer has been mostly online for the past 42 months, which explains the high power-on hours. :(

Thanks for the final recommendation!
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 18:17:27 EDT

koitsu posted : Too many screenshots/drives/devices for me to track at this point.

Explanation for your CRC errors are definitely, absolutely for sure, this: »Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

As I described earlier, issuing a write to an LBA that is marked suspect (that's what attribute 0xC5 tracks -- any LBAs which are marked suspect are unreadable, hence the CRC errors) causes the drive to re-evaluate whether or not the sector is truly bad.

Of the 18 suspect LBAs, after re-evaluation, the drive found only 1 to be permanently bad.

What's not made blatantly obvious in the thread so far is that the power-on hours counts for all of these drives is very, very high. 27,000+ hours. This explains both the sub-par performance as well as the increase in sector errors.

I would recommend you RMA the drive which now has 12 bad sectors on it, except those models of drives are (I'm fairly certain) out of warranty by now.

Finally: smartmontools' binaries are 32-bit binaries, which work just fine on Windows 7 64-bit (Windows 7 64-bit has full 32-bit compatibility). Re-read this message again and note that the guy is using smartctl on a 64-bit Windows 7 system (you can tell because smartmontools is installed in a directory called "Program Files (x86)" and not in "Program Files"). So like I said: it does work on 64-bit Windows 7. :-)
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:46:41 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : Better read results for the fresh RAID, but still low. Hey, at least it's more consistent across the entire test.

I wonder if having data on the other two drives affected the read test.
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

New Raid 0 Speed Test, 2x 640 GB WD Caviar Blacks

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:33:45 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : Read tests for the Samsung Eco, which trounces the Caviar Blacks, and the Vertex 2, which really jumps around. Is it because it is the boot drive, or is something else at play with my SATA controller?
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4EG HD155UI 1.5TB 5400 RPM
OCZ Vertex 2 120 GB SSD

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 17:26:20 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : And now the second drive. Offline uncorrectable increase by 1, but the warning disappeared.

Think it's still good?

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:01:38 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : Finished zeroing the first drive. Here's the details.

Granted the juicier details will come from the health data after the second drive.

Still disappointed with the speed test.
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:44:41 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : To make things even more confusing, the Western Digital Data LifeGuard Diagnostics tool passes that drive. It shows C5 as Current Pending Sector Count as well (200/200 as Value/Worst, but 0 for Threshold and 0 for "Warranty" column), but says both drives check out OK.

I am going to go ahead and zero both drives and see what the SMART data looks like on the other end.
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:31:00 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : Second drive. Finally something concrete. Do you know what C5 means for Caviar Blacks?

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:29:25 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : Here's the first drive. Not sure what's going on with the read speeds starting at 100 MBps and ending at 50.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 12:07:44 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : Is that exe not for Windows 7 64-bit? It's saying it's not for my version of Windows...

I also found it here, but some problem, it won't run.

»knowledge.seagate.com/articles/e···223571en
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 05:09:44 EDT

koitsu posted : Sadly I'm not very familiar with Samsung drives, so I'm not quite sure what some of these attributes are. Nothing stops a vendor from using a "commonly defined" attribute for something else (e.g. Western Digital could use 0xB5 as 'Snakes On Platters' while Samsung could use 0xB5 as 'Banana Counts').

It would really help if I could see smartmontools output instead of HD Tune Pro, since smartmontools has an internal drive database of many drives, adjusting the name and decoding method of the attribute based on model/firmware/etc.. HD Tune Pro doesn't have this (well okay, it has a very tiny one for some models of SSD, but it's no where near as accurate/correct as smartmontools).

For example, temperature on this model of drive is vendor-encoded, and attribute 0xB5 could also be vendor-encoded. It's hard for me to say at this point.

Ignoring attribute 0xB5 for a moment, and assuming 0xC8 is correctly labelled (again, smartmontools... :-) ), then the attribute indicates at one point during the zeroing the drive did experience a very, very low number of anomalies during the zeroing. Since a drive remaps an LBA to a spare sector only on a write, there may have been a few LBAs written to which caused the drive to have to issue re-write attempts before they passed, thus increasing the rate slightly. Obviously there are no remapped sectors (successful or failed for that matter), but something did happen during the writes.

I would still use the drive regardless of this attribute having incremented, but you may want to run a full read scan of the drive (reading every LBA) to make sure nothing happens there. You can do this in HD Tune Pro by using the Error tab, but make sure to uncheck the "Quick scan" option. Also be aware that HD Tune Pro and some other utilities have a known bug/issue where the error scan may suddenly start returning errors for every LBA past a certain point; this is a software bug. (It can also happen when using the Erase feature)

Finally, be aware that this model of Samsung drive is one of the drives which is known to have a catastrophic firmware bug. You can't look at the firmware number to determine if your drive has the fix or not (Samsung chose to not increment the firmware number). The only place I was able to find this fixed firmware was here.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 01:53:23 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : Here's the before/after of the spare Samsung HD155UI 1.5 TB I am going to put the RAID on before taking it apart (I incorrectly thought it was a WD Green).

What the hell is going on with B5?

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 23:22:46 EDT

koitsu posted : Agreed. With RAID 0 and those disks, you should be getting between 240-320MBytes/second on reads and writes. That almost implies that you may have 1 drive in the pair which is... well... being a jerk somehow. :-)

I should note I do have (well, did until they were recently sold) some WD Caviar Blacks that do not push 170MBytes/sec any longer. They did when I bought them, but they don't now. Their power-on hour counts were in the mid-to-high 20000 range, maybe 30000. I forget.

My guess is that performance of MHDDs gradually lowers over time due to magnetic substrates diminishing in quality as time goes on (I imagine this is caused more by writes than reads). Drives then (internally) have to do more ECC (when reading) and make heavier use of the ECC block per sector than they did when they were new.

Again: this is just a theory/guess, not based on actual scientific fact. The physical science involving hard disks is something I don't quite understand (as I said in another thread, I'm just a simple caveman... :-) ).

I cannot wait until SSDs reach 1TB capacities combined with affordable prices. I would love to replace the MHDDs in my FreeBSD box (two 1TB WD10EFRX drives in a ZFS mirror, and one 2TB WD2003FYYS drive used for nightly backups of everything on the mirror, OS disk, and my Windows workstation) with SSDs for a lot of reasons -- power and noise would be the main two!
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 22:28:03 EDT

Krisnatharok posted :

said by koitsu:

Sorry I couldn't be much more help. Welcome to one of the many reasons why I hate RAID (hardware, software, or BIOS-level -- doesn't matter which): lack of visibility into problems like this.

I'm certainly beginning to feel the same way. I originally went for it for the speed and size, but I've never had fantastic results with speed either (avg read is 120 MBps). I have heard of some people getting faster reads off single Caviar Blacks!
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 22:21:01 EDT

koitsu posted : Bummer. I wish I had local access to the system as I'd love to figure out why smartmontools isn't returning anything. The smartctl --scan -d csmi command should have returned *something* though; here's an example (see the users' own follow-up)

I guess alternately you could try booting a Linux LiveCD of some sort (such as Finnix or Knoppix) and then do smartctl -a /dev/sdb and so on. No, strike that -- don't try Finnix. Finnix comes with smartmontools except it's extremely old (5.40), lacking an up-to-date database for SSDs as well as lacking support for Intel RST.

If you zero the disk individually (outside of RAID), make sure you take a SMART attribute snapshot before AND after the zeroing!

Sorry I couldn't be much more help. Welcome to one of the many reasons why I hate RAID (hardware, software, or BIOS-level -- doesn't matter which): lack of visibility into problems like this.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 22:13:32 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : Doing "smartctl --scan -d csmi" does nothing. I dumped it to a file and the file was blank. (just to reiterate I am running smarctl in an admin cmd window)

At this point, I think I will try to replicate the data from the raid onto a spare drive I have, then take the drives out of RAID, and then zero them both and take a look at SMART data then.

I *might* do it tomorrow, but it depends on available time, and how quickly it takes to zero them (it took 4 hours for a 1TB I did not too long ago).

I might be out of luck if Acronis runs into the same error trying to replicate the array onto my WD Green.
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 19:13:53 EDT

koitsu posted : Try using /dev/csmi0, /dev/csmi1, etc... I've never particularly liked the syntax of this on Windows, heh. :-)

If that doesn't work, I'm thinking smartmontools when using /dev/csmi0,X and /dev/csmi1,X are actually able to "talk" to Intel RST but that there's some kind of internal error happening.

Also, try smartctl --scan -d csmi and provide the output here.

And no, there is nothing in the Device Manager which will give you this information. Sad but true; seemingly everything on Windows is designed from the ground up to try and hide this kind of low-level information/interface data from the user. Really ticks me off. For example, on FreeBSD 9.x, all of your RAID'd drives as well as your non-RAID'd drives would show up as individual drives, and you'd also get an additional device for the RAID'd volume, letting you talk to each individual drive (using a passthrough driver) too. Linux, same thing. There's no technical reason it can't work, it's just that Windows is silly.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 19:13:00 EDT

koitsu posted :

said by Krisnatharok:

The plot thickens, HDD Guardian doesn't even see the RAID array, just the SSD.

Yeah, this is what I predicted when I said "... I don't know if those have code in them to enumerate/probe devices on a Windows system to determine if there are drives in a RAID array or not (I'm betting they don't)".
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 18:54:39 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : The plot thickens, HDD Guardian doesn't even see the RAID array, just the SSD.

Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 18:46:58 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : I'm not too concerned with data loss, the vast majority of space on the drive is my Steam library. Comcast might get pissed if I re-download 200 games all at once though.

Anyways, I got this error all the way up to 1,5:

Smartctl open device: /dev/csmi0,0 failed: CSMI(1) failed with Error=1117

Then when I tried 2,0 and above, I got this one:

Smartctl open device: /dev/csmi2,0 failed: CSMI is not supported (Error=1)

Is the first not meant to go above 1? How high can the second number go? Is there a place I can go in Device Manager that will give me this information?
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Re: [hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 18:13:26 EDT

koitsu posted : Having trouble posting (DSLR/BBR has been having problems all day), but I'll try to explain what it is I'm seeing.

From the "event list" (which I assume is from Acronis), I see what looks like unreadable LBAs from what is declared as "hard drive 1", which is also known as E: (I determined this from the log line Locking partition E:...). Drive numbers usually start at 0, and surely your OS drive isn't E:, so I'm inclined to think the error pertains to a different volume in your system.

Given your description, it sounds like your E: drive is actually your RAID-0 array consisting of two WD6401AALS drives acting as a single volume.

The SSD drive looks fine (and looks like OCZ vendor-encodes some of their attribute data), but HD Tune Pro, sadly, does not have good support for these models of drives. Which leads me to my next point which addresses both of these things:

smartmontools has good support for SSD drives (OCZ included), and more importantly, has code for talking to drives behind Intel RST/MatrixRAID controllers which are set in RAID mode, even on Windows. The command line syntax for the latter is documented, but you may have to guess at the device string (e.g.could be /dev/csmi0,0, could be /dev/csmi1,0, could be /dev/csmi1,1, etc.). You'll know when you find it.

If you can provide output from smartctl -a for both of the WD drives I can take a look at each. But in the case either of them are experiencing issues, understand that it's RAID-0, so you're screwed either way data-wise -- but it'd at least be good to know which drive to RMA!

If this is Windows Vista or Windows 7, be aware you'll need to run/open up Command Prompt as Administrator. Once you find the drives, the easiest way to get all the output is to do something like smartctl -a /dev/csmiX,X > C:\drive1.txt to write the output to a file, then open that file in Notepad and copy-paste the output here. Please enclose the output in a {code} block (use brackets [ and ], not greater-than/less-than) when posting it so that the formatting is retained.

If you want me to look at the SSD drive I can do that too; the syntax would be more simply smartctl -a C: or possibly smartctl -a /dev/sda (yes on Windows).

Alternately I guess you could try either GSmartControl or HDD Guardian, which use the smartmontools library, but I don't know if those have code in them to enumerate/probe devices on a Windows system to determine if there are drives in a RAID array or not (I'm betting they don't). I have no familiarity with either of these.
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Making life hard for others since 1977.
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[hard drive] Concerned about HDD health

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 09:20:22 EDT

Krisnatharok posted : I recently noticed that Acronis was failing in its back-ups. The exact error is attached, as well as SMART health data on my SSD boot drive, a Vertex 2 120 GB (3.5", SATA II). It's running FW 1.29 (note: flashing to 1.37, didn't realize updates were still coming out for the V2s).

The remaining two data drives are 2x WD Caviar Black 640 GBs (WD6401AALS) in RAID 0 via the controller on my EVGA x58 mobo that have been performing well if a little slowly (read average is 120 MB/s). I've had them since 3/2009.

At this point, I'm wondering if Acronis is seeing the start of a mechanical failure, either on the part of the SSD or raid array.

I'm hoping someone like Koitsu can look at the SMART data and either rule out the SSD or identify the problem.

If it is not the SSD, what is a safe way to examine the SMART data for each MHDD without jeopardizing the integrity of the RAID array? Is it as simple as un-raiding them and booting up? I'd be worried the OS might start writing to them before I do anything... I do have a spare 1.5 TB WD Green drive I can install and mirror the RAID onto prior to examining (assuming Acronis lets me do that with the bad block it's trying to read from).
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If we lose this freedom of ours, history will record with the greatest astonishment, those who had the most to lose, did the least to prevent its happening.