TheVille

So I've got a two drive RAID1 array and when I booted up today, it told me it was in degraded mode and that if I did nothing for 20 seconds, the default options would be chosen. I did nothing. I assumed one of the two hard drives had failed and that I needed to replace one of them. It being a Sunday before a holiday Monday, I probably won't be able to do this for a few days at the earliest.

Then, the next time I rebooting, having NOT yet changed any drives, it told me it was in "Rebuilding" status. But it didn't tell me to wait 3 hours while it rebuilds or anything like that; it just proceeded with bootup. Does that mean that one of the drives has in fact not failed and that there was just some kind of out-of-sync issue that it is presently recovering from?

Is it doing this in the background as I use the computer? I'm not noticing the hard drive spinning excessively, which I thought I might expect if it were mass copying files.

I do note that this happened immediately after installing the latest Windows 10 service pack.

Update: It's now seven hours since this incident initially occurred, and I just rebooted and now the raid controller is telling me it is in optimal status.

Unless I see the problem again or someone warns me of impending doom, I'm going to assume that, during the Windows 10 Anniversary Update install, there was some kind of write error, but that the drives are still both in overall healthy state and the raid controller just had to correct the error by copying the data from the drive with good data to the drive with bad data.

Is this a RAID controller built into the motherboard? Is it hardware RAID I assume, not RAID you are running through Windows?

Flash wrote:Is this a RAID controller built into the motherboard? Is it hardware RAID I assume, not RAID you are running through Windows?

Hardware RAID, standalone card. Adaptic I think.

Not helpful, but I thought of B&B when seeing this today:

Good time to mention the reminder that RAID isn't a backup, so hopefully you have a copy of all that data in another location as well.

3-2-1 = Three copies, two different types of media, one off-site.

With as cheap as hard drives are these days I've stopped messing around with troublesome ones at all. If I think a disk is suspect I just pull it and replace it.

Flash wrote:Good time to mention the reminder that RAID isn't a backup, so hopefully you have a copy of all that data in another location as well.

3-2-1 = Three copies, two different types of media, one off-site.

With as cheap as hard drives are these days I've stopped messing around with troublesome ones at all. If I think a disk is suspect I just pull it and replace it.

I bought an external hard drive for backup less than a week after this happened.


Unfortunately, it's not off-site, and I suspect I would update it less frequently if it were.

The good news is that the RAID array has been in optimal status for a while now with no signs of trouble.

I realize I'm a bit behind, but it sounds like a bit may have flipped on one of your hard drives (or something similar) and it was caught during a check of the array. Both drives are probably fine, but it'll most likely do a full verification behind the scenes.

That's my guess at least.