Raid 0 Hard drive Error

[Bromon]

Hey Everyone,

I've been running the same hard drives on my computer for about 4 years now (upgrading everything but them along the way). They've been in RAID 0 for the whole time (2 x Maxtor 200GB), and I've been extremely happy with them. Recently, I had a couple crashes on my computer while it had been idle, until finally my computer was stalling on the windows starting screen.

I could start in safemode, which I backed everything up from. Next time I restarted, BIOS said that there was an error in my hard drives and they were not bootable. I was able to boot from the OS CD, ran a chkdsk /R scan, along with the seagate hard drive scan, did a system restore and then reformatted my hard drive.

The result of all of this is that my computer seems to be working fine, except when I start my computer it says that one of my drives has an error (see picture). I ran benchmark tests and the drive seems to be holding up fine.

So my question is: Should I keep running with these hard drives, or is this a sign of impending doom?

 

[rclarke250]

boot to the raid bios, and see if there is a log file that is still reporting an old error. If not, and it is a new error, I would play it safe and replace the drive as soon as possible, just watch where you buy drives right now, as the floods in Thailand have given almost everyone to jump the prices on hard drives to stupid prices. Newegg had a Seagate 1 TB sata hdd 1 month ago for 69$, it is now 149$. Seagate doesn't even make drive in Thailand, and Western Digital ramped up production in there Malaysia plants, so it's just a way for the retailers to gouge consumers before the Holidays.

 

[goombawaho]

I would disconnect one drive at a time and run the manufacturer's long test on each one separately. You said you ran a test but didn't mention the result or how you did it.

That should give you a verdict on each drive separately. If the results look bad, heed the warning and replace the drive. I know that the SEATools app will label a drive as bad and stop testing if it reaches 99 errors on the drive. If you see something like 25 errors, I'd be worried.

 

[Bromon]

I went into the configuration utility, which from what I understand is the Raid bios you are speaking of (correct me if I'm wrong!), and didn't find any error logs. Since it's never been an issue I haven't dealt much with hard drives and I'm pretty new with them, so I was wondering if there was another place I could check these logs?

Sorry for the lack of info on the tests; I ran a passmark benchmarking test just to make sure that the drives were still operating at the same rate as before, and then I ran a seatools scan on them, though not each one individually, just the two together. Seatools found no errors and passmark spit out the same rating for the drives as they had before. If I was to disconnect the drives from one another to test separately, would I lose all data on the drives?

Thanks.

 

[rclarke250]

You would not lose the data, as long as you booted to a cd, and didn't change anything with the drives, just tested them. Just remove the power cable, from the good drive, with the boot cd in, and boot from it, and then plug the hdd power cable back in after testing and boot from the raid again, But always make a backup of all data because when you don't, is when you need it the most.

 

[goombawaho]

So, I want to be painfully clear here.

1. Obtain the manufacturer's test utility or get the Ultimate Boot CD which has most of them on it.
2. Unplug one hard drive
3. Boot from the CD with the test utility
4. Run the short test on the drive. If errors or if advised, run the long test.
5. Swap drives that are plugged in and repeat testing.

Bootable CD Image of Seatools

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...toid=480bd20cacdec010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD