Can a raid card cause data corruption and failure?

[freaksavior]

Most probably know about the issues i've had with my Seagate drives causing the raid to fail or the drive to not show up.

Today I woke up seeing both my raid arrays were down. YAY!!! 14tb's worth of disk space not accessible.

The 1.5tb's in raid 5 (3 x 1.5's) will come up so I can back it up to my backupserver but the 4 x 2'tb wont come up anymore it seems.

I can take one drive out of the 6tb array and it shows up as 5900gb (Wtf) so i'm afraid to format it and put it back in.

I have enough hard drive space throughout my house to spread the data onto multiple computers but since I can't even get the array to show up i'm not sure what to do besides wipe it and some of the data isn't retrievable. Most of it I have hard copies of, but it was days of ripping movies onto these drives. So im a bit torn on what to do.

I know I was placing the blame on seagate, and I still think it's partially if not all of their fault for the drive failures but this is just absurd, i'm really really starting to wonder if it's other issues like the raid card or the motherboard causing issues.

 

[newtekie1]

What RAID card is it? Lost of things could cause data corruption and failure. I've got a PSU that likes to brick SATA hard drives. All the voltages check out with a multimeter, but plug a SATA hard drive into it and the thing fries within an hour(I don't even want to say how many drives I went through testing that...).

A mis-behaving RAID controller can definitely cause problems, look at nVidia's issues with their SATA controllers on their Intel boards, or even Intel's latest problem with the SATA 2 controller on their chipset. Both problems lead, or could lead, to corrupt data. RAID cards can suffer the same problems. If that RAID controller chip is unstable for whatever reason, bad things can happen.

 

[freaksavior]

What RAID card is it? Lost of things could cause data corruption and failure. I've got a PSU that likes to brick SATA hard drives. All the voltages check out with a multimeter, but plug a SATA hard drive into it and the thing fries within an hour(I don't even want to say how many drives I went through testing that...).

A mis-behaving RAID controller can definitely cause problems, look at nVidia's issues with their SATA controllers on their Intel boards, or even Intel's latest problem with the SATA 2 controller on their chipset. Both problems lead, or could lead, to corrupt data. RAID cards can suffer the same problems. If that RAID controller chip is unstable for whatever reason, bad things can happen.

2xRocket Raid 2640
40gb OS
4x2tb Seagate 5900RPM
3 x 72.11 1.5tb
GA-P35-DS3L
E4400@2.4
2x2Gb DDR2
Server 2008R2
6200 TC
RF Cooling
Thermaltake 430w

If I can manage to resurrect the dead I'm going to take them out of raid and hope they don't die anymore. The machine locked up on me three times this morning while I was trying to get everything working.

I have considered the PSU also, it's http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Thermaltake-Purepower-430W-NP-Power-Supply-Review. I'm running 8 drives on a 430w which is really a 350 but that should be enough juice for it, but the review doesn't favor the psu.

 

[newtekie1]

Good luck on resurrecting the dead, I know how much it sucks to loose data.

As for the PSU, it shouldn't have a problem, drives aren't really power hungry things, especially not those 5900RPM drives, nor is the rest of your system. That doesn't mean the PSU isn't sending out the occasional voltage spike which is causing havok.

I'm not saying it is the PSU, things like this can be extremely hard to track down.

 

[AsRock]

Last time i had a Array issue i added a single disk and installed a fresh copy of Vista to the drive and fixed both arrays with intels tools.

However this was with a intel chipset but worked for me.

Maybe the card is faulty and not the array. I guess the only real true way to find out is to replace the card or even if you have enough disks around try the raid card with them.

I take it the card shows up still ?.

 

[freaksavior]

yes the cards show up, thanks for the tips, i'll work on it.

 

[Lazzer408]

Most retail drives can't be used on a RAID due to the long TLER (up to 2 min). The controller might kick it out of the array if it takes too long (>10sec). RAID -0 will always fail with data loss because of this. A mirror can usually recover until the next drive recovery event in which case it drops out of the array again. WD RE series (enterprise drives) have a low TLER designed to be used in a RAID. Those are the only drives I will run in RAID arrays.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery

Also:

"Hard drive manufacturers are drawing a distinction between "desktop" grade and "enterprise" grade drives. The "desktop" grade drives can take a long time (~2 minutes) to respond when they find an error, which causes most RAID systems to label them as failed and drop them from the array. The solution provided by the manufacturers is for us to purchase the "enterprise" grade drives, at twice the cost, which report errors promptly enough so that this isn't a problem. This "enterprise" feature is called TLER, ERC, and CCTL."

Look into a utility called "WDTLER" to enable TLER. I don't know if it still works or not.

 

[NashOwens]

You can recover data from RAID hard drive with 3rd party data recovery software.I have succeed to recover data from RAID 0 HD with Tenorsahre Data Recovery.It can recover data after deeply scanning your hard drive to look for lost data due to drive crash,system sabotage, virus corrupted partitions etc. It supports RAID 0,RAID 5 file system.You can download it and scan your hard drive for free to preview whether your data can be recovered. Get it from http://www.any-data-recovery.com/product/datarecoveryenterprise.htm

 

[Lazzer408]

You can recover data from RAID hard drive with 3rd party data recovery software.I have succeed to recover data from RAID 0 HD with Tenorsahre Data Recovery.It can recover data after deeply scanning your hard drive to look for lost data due to drive crash,system sabotage, virus corrupted partitions etc. It supports RAID 0,RAID 5 file system.You can download it and scan your hard drive for free to preview whether your data can be recovered. Get it from http://www.any-data-recovery.com/product/datarecoveryenterprise.htm

You wont recover anything if the drives keep dropping from an array can ya?