I'm having a little problem with my RAID drive. It keeps locking up and/or freezing up my computer when I access it. Luckily not every time though and I've just backed up over 90GB of data.

Is there anyway of testing to see whether it's the array, the individual drives or my motherboard that's causing the problem? Preferably without wiping the drive, but if I have to so be it.

RAID 0 (stripe), 2x 250GB Samsung SATA drives, Foxconn mobo (n4 series I think)

Thanks

Have you looked in Windows Event Viewer to see what error, if any, have been reported?

Michael J

NTFS error 55.

Disk is corrupt and unusable.

Except it IS still working aand I'm currently taking a second backup of stuff I do not want to loose.

So, is there any way to check whether this is the array, the drives or the mobo? Wouldn't be surprised if it was the mobo, it's been acting up for a few weeks now. Just can't afford a new one right now.

Hard to say, you may want to see if there are any otehr event messages that could shed some light. But in any event RAID 0 is the absolute worst option for any data you can't afford to lose.

IMHO, RAID 0 is only worthwhile on a home machine for activities such as a scratch disc video editing that requires high throughput with large files. And even in those situations the "scratch" files on the RAID array should only be copies of the original source material stored elsewhere. Other than that, there is little to no benefit to running RAID 0.

If I was in your situation I would first copy all the information off. Then decide what you want to do with the drives: single drives, RAID 0, RAID 1, whatever. Even if you want to stay with RAID 0 I would destroy the array and run the dives as single drives for a week or two. If both are operating normally, then try rebuilding the array and running them that way for a few more weeks before putting anything important on them.

But, again, RAID 0 is a poor choice for a home computer in most situations.

Michael J

Thanks.

Is there anyway of checking drives for faults other than scandisk and chkdisk?

Yes. Go to the drive manufacturer's site and download their utilities. Ususally the utilities run from a boot disk. However, if there is a version that you can run from windows I would still go with the DOS version - especially in your case.

Michael J