4 of 8 drives going offline…Raid Card?

[Fred Jodry]

Might be 4 hard drives getting aggravated by an overheating problem. Also might be that one of the voltages from the power supplies of both the failing box and the test box is sagging 2 percent, or less. It also might be that there is a piece of really freaky data on one of those 4 hard drives. All 8 drives have been labelled by their formatting so you can switch cables willy- nilly and their labelling will probably stay the same. Replacing the 4 drives and shelving the originals for only the crude purposes sounds like a good idea. Also, enough people in the forum have had trouble with a HighPoint RAID card. Other than that, make a new neutrodyne coil with a Grinan angle in your Stanwyck coil winder with a Faraday shield next to it. That`ll do it.

[Alex Gerulaitis]

[Fred Jodry] “Other than that, make a new neutrodyne coil with a Grinan angle in your Stanwyck coil winder with a Faraday shield next to it. That`ll do it.”

That solved a lot of problems for me in the past. 🙂

I’d also venture with a probability of just one drive failing or timing out, and the controller not being intelligent enough to figure out which drive it is and marking all four off-line. If that’s indeed the case, it’d be really hard to trouble-shoot short of replacing drives one-by-one.

Alex (DV411)

[Litzwire]

The first thing I did was fabricate the neutrodyne coil and interestingly enough it helped me go back in time one month and I was able to freely use the array with no problem. But the Faraday shield burnt up after a few hours, forcing me to whirl back to the present day, where the array still didn’t work. I have actually considered that there is a problem with a single drive and the RAID controller is confused into thinking it’s all 4 in that division. I believe I will just have to buy the new controller to troubleshoot that possibility, because after that the expense gets greater and greater, and if it isn’t the controller, I will have to spend money anyway. I just wondered if there is a way the controller is seeing those 4 drives a certain way no matter how the cables are arranged. That would satisfy my most recent instinct, which is to buy a new, not exactly cheap RAID card.

Thanks for weighing in!
Hop

[Bob Zelin]

everyone learns eventually that when you buy cheap stuff, it really doesn’t work like the expensive stuff. This is not a “knockoff” woman’s handbag – you make your living with this equipment. Can you really afford to lose your media ?

Bob Zelin

[Litzwire]

Hmmm. I suppose it wasn’t suggested at the time by my reseller that there was something more expensive and better for my application than two $5000 8-bay enclosures running on the suggested interface option of the time, and a $300+ raid controller card running in a $12,000 computer system, connected to a $4000 video interface connected to $60,000 worth of VTR and display equipment, playing out material acquired with my $120,000 worth of camera gear. I don’t think an unwillingness to spend money is my problem, my friend….I’d like to get what I have working, not matter how cheap one finds its separate components to be, so I can get some of that info back, and money is certainly not the issue. However, it doesn’t make sense to spend money on something that may not be the problem until it is believed to be a problem, which is the only reason I brought up expense. So, leaving all that pointless conjecture behind to follow up what I find to be a purposeless post, the logical options to me are to buy the same controller card and/or four new SATA drives and rebuild for each one. If I cannot personally solve the issue, believe me, I will happily pay for someone to come in here and solve it themselves. If it doesn’t get solved, it’s not the end of the world – much of the data is backed up to yet another $4000 worth of back-up storage. After I get my problem solved, I will eagerly look into the better and more expensive options for fast storage….I await your constructive suggestions on that.

[Fred Jodry]

Some things to try:
1. Aim a fan at the controller card.
2. Aim a fan at the problem hard drives. (If this works it`ll buy you time).
3. Get the data backed off in short sessions then see if the RAID box still has enough performance with 4 drives not 8.
4. Get the data backed off in short sessions then see if re-arranging the 8 drives and performing a full zero- out and reformatting fixes a data or other problem.
5. Since the problem might be one drive alone, get one replacement hard drive and zero it out before trying it in each drive`s place. Since you are working with a really big RAID it`s probably set up with redundant data not pure RAID 0. (Step 5 usually works better than step 4). You can ask on this forum how exact the replacement hard drive has to be.

[Litzwire]

Thanks a bunch for the help! I have thought that one of the reasons could be heat on the RAID card, as it’s set right next to an 8800 GTS video card, and I mean RIGHT next. The array is, of course, set up RAID 5, but I do like your suggestion #5, and I will try that. The reason I haven’t done much in the way of #3 and #4 is simply because of my own time. I’ve got lots of editing to do lately, so I was looking for a fairly fast solution, or at least a logical reason for the same 4 drives going offline, before I scrap the whole thing and get new storage. Once I do that, I really have to go back to square one on my whole system setup, as dual-eSATA is now antiquated, and so are my only-2-year-old computer components. Shew….remember when BetaSP was a standard for like 15 years? And now there are no standards past 1 year.

Thanks!
Hop

[Fred Jodry]

Here a number 6, really it`s a repeat so just do it after.
6. The problem might be one of usually two, voltages going through a power plug to one or more hard drives. Jam wires in the plugs, run the box a while, then check with a good voltmeter if one of the voltages went sour 2 percent. I had a power molex socket on a favorite scsi hard drive that needed soldering. I shined a small copper ribbon and soldered a nice bridge.

[Litzwire]

I will certainly look into that. I’ll report if I have any success….at least for the sake of future troubleshooters. Thanks a bunch!

[Litzwire]

In my last post I said I would look into that. However, I should remind you of the original post where I explain how this problem is the same across two different enclosures, leaving me to believe that the problem lies in either the controller or the drives themselves, and not any connections or boards in the enclosures (even though I replaced the eSATA board in the first enclosure thinking that would solve the problem). I would think that it couldn’t be the power connections in the enclosure as this would have been remedied with the second enclosure. To backtrack a bit, I have to say that the most logical explanation to me would be that this is all drive related – given that even when I change cable positions from the card, those 4 drives are always the ones that go offline. However, the ProAvio tech support seemed to think that there was no way all four drives malfunction at once, and that would be my assumption as well, but therein lies the rub: Can a controller card, if it’s the thing that’s malfunctioning, always associate it’s own internal problems with a select group of drives, no matter which output they are plugged into, or should the problem always move to different drives according to which output they are using? Does that question make sense? To get closer to the bottom of this, I’m about to take a step….I just got a couple of extra drives in from ebay. They are older drives and are not available through traditional sellers. I am going to replace the first drive in that 4-drive group and just see what the interface says. I will let you know.