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[mnemonicj Profile]

My new home server, Intel quad core Xeon with 3 hard drives in a RAID 5 running Windows Server 2008, lost a hard drive in the RAID 5 today. The RAID 5 is maintained by the onboard Intel southbridge chip and running Intel Matrix Storage software. The software is reporting the hard drive as "Missing". I am very unhappy with the Intel Matrix Storage software, it has caused issues with this RAID before and I suspect that it may be causing this issue.

Bad news is, I am away from home and will be for another week. My sister-in-law is stopping by my house tomorrow and will help me troubleshoot the issue for about 15 minutes max. Note: she knows how to operate a computer, but knows nothing about the hardware. So, I am trying to maximize my 15 minutes to try and figure out the issue and get the RAID rebuilding so it will be complete before I get home.

I already rebooted the server remotely, but no luck, the drive is still reported as missing. Here are my next steps that I will need to give as instructions to my sister-in-law over the phone:
1. I will shut down the server remotely and have her remove the power cable for 30 seconds, then reconnect the cable and power the server back on. I will then check remotely to see if it is there.
2. I will shut down the server remotely and have her remove the RAID drives from their hard drive bays (swappable bays) and reinsert them, then power the server back on and I will check remotely to see if it is there.

I don't think there is much else she can do without opening the case, which I really don't want her to do. Anything else I can do? Anyone else have an experience with a "Missing" hard drive from a RAID array? I hope it's not a hardware issue, but it fairly well could be. I really hope it is not the backplane of my hard drive bay because it would be the most difficult to replace.

[NT50 Profile]

Sounds to me that the Seagate harddrive went out. Shoudl ahve went with WD. I'm still running a Raid 5 on two different servers right now for past 3 years and no glitches. I'm also using the Intel and not LSI...............

[mnemonicj Profile]

Jeff, I have to admit, the only three drives I have ever seen fail were Western Digital. Two of them were mine, 40 GB after 9 months, 80 GB after 4 years, and one of them was a friend's, 160 GB after 1.5 years. I have three 320 GB Seagate hard drives that have been running non-stop for about 4 years now. They have been doing so well, I moved them from my old server to my media center.

Now, on to the situation at hand. I had my sister-in-law unplug the server after I shut it down and when it was powered back up, the drive was present and available to rebuild the RAID. I started the RAID rebuild and when I finished the process of adding the drive to the RAID, the drive became "missing" again. I shut down the server and had my sister-in-law remove and reseat the hard drive bay and when it was powered back up, the drive was present and available to rebuild the RAID. The exact same thing happened, I started the RAID rebuild and when I finished the process of adding the drive to the RAID, the drive became "missing" again.

I rebuilt the RAID onto my extra 500 GB drive that I already had in my server, the rebuild finished earlier today, and the RAID is up and running with redundancy again.

I will run tests on the drive to see if the drive has actually failed in some way, but I am suspicious of the Intel Storage Matrix drivers and other software, especially with what happened. Even if the drive does fail due to hardware issues, I am not willing to blame Seagate yet, because even though I love Newegg, I have to admit that they are horrible at shipping multiple OEM hard drives with appropriate packaging. I may not order another hard drive from Newegg again because of the packaging issues.

[jbullard]

This is a long shot but you may be able to change the serial number of the HDD and try again. There are a few programs out there that have this capability but the ISM software may be recognizing something with the drive and flags it by serial number.

[mnemonicj Profile]

I am big enough to admit when I am wrong. Jeff, you were right, the drive is dead.

After getting home and having a chance to test the drive on my server, on two ports and an external USB dock, I knew the drive was bad. The server took over 15 minutes to boot when the drive was connected to a SATA port (which is long even for a server) and when I removed the drive, the server had no trouble booting in less than 2 minutes.

I then put the drive in an external USB to SATA dock and it failed to recognize the drive. Finally, I connected the drive to the SATA port of another computer and the computer took 10 minutes to boot before I couldn't wait anymore and shut the computer down.

I am happy to report that this is the only Seagate hard drive I have ever had fail out of the 10 I currently have (three 320GB IDE 7200.10, one 500GB SATA 7200.11, and six 500GB SATA 7200.12) and since it was part of a RAID 5, I lost no data.