I have a 4 drive raid 10 setup. After replacing a front case fan that required me to remove 2 of the drives, I started up and matrix storage manager said it was degraded and missing one drive but it started up fine.

I shutdown and open the case and sure enough, I had partially unplugged one of the power cables. I plug it in securely and start the computer only to have it tell me one drive is completely failed and this somehow caused the whole array to fail and is now not bootable.

I turn off the pc and unplug the sata line and startup. During bootup it shows 3 perfectly fine drives, but the array is still failed and not bootable. How can I have 3 good drives in raid 10 and have a failed array??

5/11/2010 5:39:42 PM

failed drive = parity drive?

[Edited on May 11, 2010 at 6:08 PM. Reason : was thinking raid5. i dunno chief. shitty software raid solution?]

5/11/2010 6:06:40 PM

in raid 10 is raid 1+0 so in a way they are all parity drives.

Now it's saying the failed drive is "Offline member"

No, it's ICH10R on an Asrock P55 Extreme board

[Edited on May 11, 2010 at 6:10 PM. Reason : .]

5/11/2010 6:09:02 PM

yikes.... doesn't sound too good...

I once had a cheap raid controller that required the raid matrix be restored before it would boot happily. It had a little utility to help that process (I think it was like F3 or something). Ringing any bells?

5/11/2010 10:18:25 PM

I hope you had a backup of your minimalist Raid 1+0. That sucks.

5/11/2010 10:53:48 PM

well its basically A+B stripped and another mirrored A+B. so if you loose both A's, you are fucked. There is no parity drive. Should have done a Raid 5 because raid 10 is stupid. If you want the speed and security, go Raid 5 or 6. For server applications, raid 50 or 60 is good. But yeah. I'm running a raid 5 but still have a single drive as the bootable disk and running the raid separately.

What size drives are you using?

5/11/2010 11:10:43 PM

raid 50 or 60? how much disk space do you plan on wasting on parity?

5/12/2010 11:15:24 AM

I have 4 x 500GB.

It was no dice. I just reinstalled 7. This computer is fairly new. (I built it over spring break) and I still had everything backed up from the transfer from then, so my losses were minimal.

Why do you say raid 10 is stupid..?

With raid 10 you are safer in my 4 drive setup. You are guaranteed the ability to lose one and then have a 33% chance of getting away with another loss. With raid 5 you be 100% screwed after one.

Raid 5 has comparable read speeds to RAID 10, but 10 is much better at write speeds.

The only advantage RAID 5 has is you waste less space.

[Edited on May 12, 2010 at 2:15 PM. Reason : .]

5/12/2010 2:14:30 PM

^while that's true on paper your recent experience says otherwise.

5/12/2010 7:46:47 PM

lol, while that may seem to be the case, whatever caused the raid 10 to fail I'm sure would have caused a raid 5 to fail as well.

But I suppose I can't be certain without knowing exactly what went wrong...

5/13/2010 9:01:16 AM

smooth, raid 50/60 is for sever application, and yes it eats up space for data security and really on needed in dire situations and no, I don't ever plan on having a raid 50/60 setup.

Quote :

"Why do you say raid 10 is stupid..? "

Personally, for consumer needs, Raid 5 is more than acceptable and while raid 10 gives you faster write speeds, you loose 50% of your space while Raid 5 you just loose one hard drive in the mix for parity.

And honestly, the probability of loosing two drives in a raid setup is a low percentage, thats' why its always a good idea to mix up the drive dates, keep an eye on the drives' health and to backup constantly.

Also to note, I'd bet that using a modern 1 or 1.5TB 7200 drive in a raid 5 would beat the current raid 10 setup in both read and write speeds of your 500's. And it would be hardly noticeable in normal applications like word.

5/14/2010 11:57:33 PM