So much for IDE raid reliability

[parkan]

I knew I should have gone with scsi, but the multitude of ide raid users convinced me otherwise. Well, boys and girls, I was right. 10 minutes ago over 60 gigabytes of neatly compressed and edited star trek and futurama episodes, my asheron's call 2 beta, my pagefile, bookmark list that I have been collecting for months, my unfinished website and most importantly gigabytes upon gigabytes of star trek (did I mention that already?) that I recorded myself vanished in a puff of smoke (well, a BSOD actually). The array was at most a month old and I was planning to back up most of the stuff on dvd but I didn't have enough to buy that many dvd-rs. The crash happened as I was reinstalling AC2 beta (an update error forced me to reinstall) and after walking off for a minute I came back to a kernel paging error, which makes sense since the drive that provided the pagefile has apparently failed. I still have a shred of hopse since the controller still reports the array as functioning and I can still see the drive in device manager. I can also list the files in the top lvl directory (i.e. I can double-click the drive in explorer and it wil provide a file listing) but I cannot go into a deeper directory or read/write files. However, drive also does not show up in the storage management panel in advanced tools which is probably not a good sign. I was unable to get the card working with linux (I don't want to mess with the drivers too much knowing that it could easily damage the drives) so I cannot test it from linux, but I still hope it is fixable. My system is win2k/debian linux (but linux never accessed the array), a7n266 mobo, TX2000 PCI raid and 2x maxtor DX740 raid 0. The drives were semi-adeqately cooled (no fancy dedicated drive coolers, but two decent fans blew quite a bit of air over them and they were never hot to the touch. I don't know the exact t since SMART cannot access raided drives to the best of my knowledge) and the array was moderately stressed (I've done some video editing and large file transfers, but the array was not used all that often because I primarily use linux) . PCI is running at exactly 33Mhz (that's a feature of a7n266, it has a separate PCI crystal) and fsb is set to 140. If this is unfixable, I am probably going to lose my faith in IDE forever, sell my left kidney and get an all-scsi system, plus some more to those data recovery guys. :( : (

Did I mention that losing all that star trek makes me feel like howling on the moon? :(

EDIT: if this helps, attempting to change directories on the drive yeilds an "error performing inpage operation" message.

[parkan]

UPDATE: the array becomes accessible after a couple of reboots for a few minutes, but after copying several files it makes a grinding noise and the error returns. I am planing to get the most important stuff on dvd, then rebuild and reformat. Sounds good?

[parkan]

Erm, where is everyone? Usually I would get at least one response by now :eh?:

[MospeadasDark]

Erm..bump?

All I know is my RAID-0 isn't transferring any of my files much faster than single HDD's. My wavs are ~300MB big and some of my pics are ~450MB. It's not much faster...and I blame VIA for that. Or WinXP for crappy SCSI support. I'll make final decision once SP1 is out for d/l.

After bumping my RAID-0 drives on accident, WinXP and the array went funky on me. Reinstall WinXP on another drive and commence backup. I transfer files about the same still.

One word: Blah!

edit: SCSI drives are expensive for a reason=) You get what you pay for.

[JigPu]

Me forget which Raid 0 is... Mirror correct?

If your drives still physically work, you can try some data recovery software. I know that the program I used will read RAID arrays, and as long as your drive physically works it should be able to get the data off it.

I used it to save hundreds of megabytes of extremely rare MP3s and videos of mine. I would have killed myself without it.

Check it out here: http://www.r-tt.com/

I hope you can get your episodes back!! I love Star Treck too, and I wish that I had all of Next Gen on some format..
JigPu

[parkan]

Unfortunately (in this situation), RAID0 is striping, which means that if one drive dies I lose everything. In this case it wouldn't matter though, because as it turned out both drives went crapola. Luckily, in the brief period during which they worked, I managed to grab the rarer episodes and burn them on a couple dvd-rs, but then the drives just stopped working at all. After 4 or so hours of running the maxtor diagnostic tool it reported that both drives were "certified error free". Mmmkay. Let's hope that I at least get to keep the drives if I lose the data. Paying $300 for a month of extended storage and speed isn't fun.

[parkan]

Oh, and thanks for that link. Looks promising. Even tough it won't be of use this time, hard drives around me crash very often (that's why I was all for magento-optical media beack in the day :p ), so I'll keep it handy :)

[parkan]

Finally, as for transfer rates, I also had a bad experience with winxp, both scsi drives (it read at a bloody 5MBps while under linux it easily did 15+) and raid. I have the ATTO screenshots somewhere (or were they on the array?), simply switching to 2k greatly improved my performance, although it took a bios update to bring writes up to speed. I suggest you get the latest bios for your board and see if it helps.

[Johnny Knoxville]

there is a beta SCSI fix on the Microsoft website for Windows XP, that should increase its performance.

[Caffinehog]

It might also be worth doing this:

Run FDISK /MBR

Make sure you use the MBR switch. This repairs the master boot record. This has saved lots of data for lots of people.

[Robbie]

How hot do they get? If you don't have any type of cooling on them, chances are they are dead. I have a 80 gig that gets pretty warm. I've put a cooler on it but needless to say it's starting to click and it's ONLY 4 months old.
Rob

[parkan]

Great.. just typed a 2-page reply and the server crapepd out on me... I am going to retype when I finish kicking the case to my left.

[Skiing Squirrel]

Kicking helps.

[HeXenViRii]

hehe , whenever i type that much i always copy it to the clipboard b4 i hit submit , cause u just never know !

[The Spyder]

When i got my AT7 and my IT7- it has 8 channels total........ so i just setup on drive per channel when i did a massive backup
Spyder~

[parkan]

sigh. I still don't feel like retyping, so I am making a quick summary:

the beta scsi fix doesn't help
fdisk does not come with w2k, and the MBR was ok
the drives are much cooler than my wd40
all data is gone
both drives have (had) bad clusters (MANY bad clusters) and thier SMART functionality was broken (i.e. they failed SMART system self-tests)
The maxtor utility set supposedly fixed all the errors and the drives seem to work now
I am burning daily dvd backups of my files (and saving for a scsi system)

[mugambo]

Since nobody else is saying it, I will: Parkan, I am sorry your stuff is in jeopardy; however, it seems obvious to me that you knew enough that your data should have been backed up. I know it is cold, but I feel like this is as much "operator error" as anything else. I have a daughter who is a writer and lost an entire book (other than the hard copy) to a bad hard drive. (Thank you God for scanners!)

I will tell you the same thing I told her: If losing something on your HD is going to hurt, back it up. If you know you are skipping backups (whether for cost or WHATEVER reason) and you lose something, go talk to the mirror. Your PC is a tool; use it correctly.

(Bring on the back lash, I am earning it I guess. PLEASE back your stuff up properly.)

Dave

[Audioaficionado]

Hi parkan,

You're a savvy computer guy. The problem isn't scsi or ide raid, but inproper implimentation. 0 strip is the absolute worst raid to use for anything. There is no provision for data recovery in the event of a HD failure plus you drop your MTBF in half because you have twice the chance a drive is going to fail. The same could have happened in scsi raid 0.

Raid 3 or 5 is much better because if one HD craps out, you can just swap it out and rebuild from the other HDs in the array. It's fast like 0 stripe and redunadant like 1 stripe.

Of course ide 5 or 3 will be much more expensive but not much more than a scsi 0+1 stripe array I think. Go for raid 1 or 0+1 so you will have more secure data.

In any event, get away from 0 stripe raid. It's not worth the aggrevation.

Try this site: http://www.acnc.com/04_00.html

They can explain it much better than I can.

[SpaceRangerJoe]

if you want to get to get star trek back, pm me or something. a close friend of mine has gigs upon gigs of star trek, starting with tos, and going through voyager. he runs an ftp a lot, and would be happy to help you rebuild your collection. oh, and we are both on 100baset, with an oc12 backbone, so transfers are fast =). hope that makes you feel better.

[Daemonfly]

I lost over 800+ MP3s on the infamous IBM hard drive failures :( Most of them were rare remixes, etc... I didn't back up as I planned on borrowing my friend's DVD-R drive.

[mugambo]

I can sympathize. The date was around April 12, 1999. A story was carried on several national networks of a major fire at the intermodal ramp of a multi-billion dollar national transportation company in Atlanta.

Both my primary and backup servers burned up in that fire. The next day I was informed by the operations group that they were not taking the backup tapes off site for retention(!!). My partner had taken a special backup about 3-weeks prior to the fire and put on our data warehouse server. It helped, but it wasn't enough.

We pulled data from the 3-week old backup, from the data warehouse, re-created (other verbs might be more appropriate) some of the data, and said good-bye to the rest of the data.

Losing data is a drag -- doesn't matter if it is MP3's or bills of lading. Professionals lose data too. I still prosper as a database consultant. Backups are critical.

Dave

[Audioaficionado]

Once you get a backup routine, it's not that hard to maintain backups. Like any good habit, it takes a few weeks to establish.

[parkan]

I was obviously aware of the dangers of raid 0, however: First, an IDE array with striping (whatever it is, 1, 10, etc) will always be much less relaible than a scsi array, since scsi disks are primarily aimed at enterprises and relaibility, as opposed to affordability for IDE. Second, while I was cautious of using even SCSI raid at first, the lack of problems reported on the board (perhaps 1 failed raid 0 array per 20 single deathstars) and the overwhelmingly positive attitude towards IDE raid on this board finally convinced me to buy one. Another important point here is the fact that backing up over 80 gigs in no easy task. As I said, I was preparing for a dvd-r backup, but it is rather pricey and I cannot perform them on a regular basis. Normally, all my important directories are rsynced to my sparc box and to the celeron server as a weekly cron job, but nither of them have enough space for a raid backup.

Audioaficionado, I am indeed a (somewhat) savy tech guy, and I am familiar with raid levels. However, anything beyound 1/0 (just FYI, the drives are running in 1 now, and I am of course experiencing performance issues as well as lack of space) requires considerable investement, at the very least for the extra drives and for a controller card which can handle it.

Sorry if I seem hostile, I am still rather bitter about the incident. (Oh, and SpaceRangerJoe, I might just take you up on that offer ;) )

[Audioaficionado]

No problems with your attitude. I'd probably not have handled a loss like that any better. SCSI is better than IDE, no arguments there. IDE RAID is a poor man's RAID. When you do get your new scsi raid set up do 1 or 0+1, never 0. Good luck on recovering your shows.

[mugambo]

"Never Raid 0" BAH!

[Audioaficionado]

Originally posted by mugambo
"Never Raid 0" BAH!

If you back up frequently somewhere off the array it's fine. If not, then it's not a matter of if you have a failure, but when.

[mugambo]

"If you back up frequently somewhere off the array it's fine. "

Bingo.

[Audioaficionado]

Originally posted by mugambo
"If you back up frequently somewhere off the array it's fine. "

Bingo.

OTOH if you have insane amounts of movie files, mp3s, etc to back up... you might be better off with a more robust raid configuration as burning 100s of DVDs isn't always an option.

Although if you kept up from the get go, raid 0 still would work.

As always, YMMV,

[AviClocker]

mugambo must have far too much time on his hands to keep reinstaling after his raid 0 packs up on him I had ide raid 0 and i will never ever go back to it i have reinstalled windows about 10 times in six months and its fudged up one of my hard disks ( broken smart and lots of lost clusters) does any one know how to get round these by the way?

There is nothing more anoying then spending hours saving stuff to your hard disk/s to have it disappear in the blink of an eye or blue screen

Parkan we should start an anti ide raid 0 campaign!

[Nico3k]

Originally posted by HeXenViRii
hehe , whenever i type that much i always copy it to the clipboard b4 i hit submit , cause u just never know !

same here man :D

[Audioaficionado]

Originally posted by Nico3k


same here man :D

Yeah I hear ya.

I've been bit by that dog one too many times too. :D

[parkan]

Hmm. UPN just moved Voyager reruns to once a week schedule. Hmm. They seem to have a pretty twisted sense of humor.

[ThePerfectCore]

*Cringes*

Dude, yuck! It scares me to death when I finish downloading a few video clips or MP3s, I always think the drive will explode sometime in the five minutes it takes me to test the download and burn it.

All of my ripped DVD movies (the ones I don't dare touch the actual DVDs for :D) are burned to CD-R, along with all of my music, *everything* on the E: partition, My Documents, Favorites, and a few saved games for... games.

*Shudders*

HDDs are horribly unreliable. CD-Rs rock.

[frodoski]

The ONLY value(?) of RAID 0 is for performance. The more spindles you have turning the faster you read your data and write your data. Fault tolerance is not in the picture. I have done lots o' database recovery, and I cannot stress the VALUE of back-ups ALWAYS...ALWAYS...ALWAYS Backup tha data!

[parkan]

Well, as everyone seems to ignore the fact that backing up 160 gigs of data is a bit out of my budget. I am not a major hoting company nor am I a wealthy individual. The raid array pretty much consumed every penny I had, because of all the positive feedbakc on the forums. I went against my principles in trusting IDE, and I will never do that again.

[Audioaficionado]

With 0 stripe scsi raid and no back up you will still get bit. It's never if but when a hard drive or controller fails. Even scsi arrays go down eventualy. A DVD burner is the best long term solution. The media is outragously expensive right now. Get the scsi but back up the rarest shows first.

[ThePerfectCore]

Well, as everyone seems to ignore the fact that backing up 160 gigs of data is a bit out of my budget. I am not a major hoting company nor am I a wealthy individual. The raid array pretty much consumed every penny I had, because of all the positive feedbakc on the forums. I went against my principles in trusting IDE, and I will never do that again.

Got a burner? You can get hundreds upon hundreds of CD-Rs for free with rebates.

[Audioaficionado]

If it's HDTV quality video, you'll need DVD. If it's just cable or VHS quality, CD-R & mpeg 4 should do ya. Good CD-RW burners go for $75 and blanks are almost free.

[Malakai]

if i lost my 40+ gigs of fansubbed anime, i would cry like a little ho
seriously, i think i would actually cry, after beating the comp.


/me hopes parkan recovers everything.

im actually just gonna get 2x 120gb WD 8meg HDD's and sell my maxtor. and im gonna run them in just 2x single drives, so i wont lose everything if one fails. i havent heard about one failing yet though

[Toysrme]

Personaly I just hate Maxtor.

They've shot 0-3 with mee having 3 fail.

WD or IMB for me. (Now apparantly WD)

[Audioaficionado]

I've only used WD and so far so good.

[RangerJoe]

norton ghost helped me out alot when my old hard drive failed...might try that

edit: you have to get another hard drive..install an OS on there..and run the new hard drive as the boot device...thus enabling you to transfer the goods from the old hard drives