Why is my drive pausing?

I have recently noticed some problems with my systems hard drives. It's a hardware ATA RAID 1 with a pair of 250MB drives.

The HD light both turns on solid for a second and also turns off during heavy access for a moment, causing pauses in whatever application needs it.

Here is a picture of a HD speed test.. you can clearly see the dropouts caused by the pauses and delays.



Are my drives dying? Unfortunatly I STILL have not found a utility that can read the SMART data off drives behind a RAID controller and Windows of course will not boot if I take a drive and put it onto an ATA controller to test.

Any ideas? I'm really hoping one or more of the drives are not dying on me.

An error scan shows no bad blocks. DiskCheck reports no problems either. Drive is not fragmnented (which should not affect benchmarks anyway)

I think yours is better off then mine... Mine had a read error and stopped the test

I decided to play around with the hardware. I disabled the RAID function and tried each drive seperatly, same problem on both.

But.. I put a drive on the regular ATA controller (the DFI 875ProB has 2 IDE and 2 IDE RAID controllers) and it works perfectly.. no more pauses and stutters.

So I either have a hardware problem with the RAID controller or a driver issue. At least the drives themselves are fine.

Whats the consensus on using a hardware RAID vs Windows XP for RAID 1? I mainly want protection in case of sudden drive failure, and the read speed boost is nice.

iansmith said:

I decided to play around with the hardware. I disabled the RAID function and tried each drive seperatly, same problem on both.

But.. I put a drive on the regular ATA controller (the DFI 875ProB has 2 IDE and 2 IDE RAID controllers) and it works perfectly.. no more pauses and stutters.

So I either have a hardware problem with the RAID controller or a driver issue. At least the drives themselves are fine.

Whats the consensus on using a hardware RAID vs Windows XP for RAID 1? I mainly want protection in case of sudden drive failure, and the read speed boost is nice.

Click to expand...

I believe hardware RAID is the way to go.

Generally when the drive shows significant drops during speed test the drive is seeking away from the data track to go get a reallocated sector see this post for more information.

You can get a SMART program such as DTEMP and look at the number of reallocation events or retired sectors to see if there have been alot. Most drives do not grow reallocated sectors.

Either the drivers for my RAID chip are broken or the chip itself is failing.

When I move the drives to the standard IDE controller all the problems go away and everything runs great.

SMART data shows no problems for either drive.

Are you able to get a smooth HDSpeed graph when you take the drives out of RAID? If so then you're problem is probably with the drivers.

I had PSU voltage problems that caused the same problems. Maybe you could check that too?