Perfectly Healthy hard drive is reported as failed

[HelpDeskJami]

I would REALLY appreciate any help I can get on this one. I have two PC's that are having this issue. These PC's have two 200GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 drives configured for RAID 1. On occassion when the users boot the PC's they will get a message that says that one of the drives is failed or degraded. They will then reboot thier system and the array will begin to rebuild itself.This happens occassionally and since it's mirrored it doesn't cuase a huge issue except for the time where the array has to rebuild. We have updated the BIOS for the motherboard just a couple days ago. Everything else seems to be current on the PC's. We had another user that had the same problem, but his machine was set in a RAID 0 array. Thanks for your help!!

Jamie Benson

 

[wahnula]

We had another user that had the same problem, but his machine was set in a RAID 0 array

OUCH! Hope he had a backup.

For a raid controller to declare a drive as bad could be caused by many many factors. I had a RAID5 array that would drop a drive every 30 days, and a different one at that. All drives were good. I replaced the onboard controller with a PCI 3ware and the problem disappeared, but I still got a "time-out" warning once from the 3ware alert notifier. Equivalent to a 'nobody home' or 'line busy' it did not drop the drive.

If this is SATA I would first start with replacing the cables. Since it happens at reboot maybe one of the drives is not spinning up fast enough, is the PSU large enough? Is there a BIOS or controller setting for delayed spin-up of drives?

Does the same drive drop from the RAID 1?
Is the array SCSI, IDE or SATA?
Which RAID controller and driver version are you using?

 

[HelpDeskJami]

OK. I have to revise my previous posts. The guys are telling me that this is actually happening while the PC is on and has been running for a while. They are SATA drives as well. I am still gathering the other info. Thanks for the help so far!!

Jamie