I use Six 1TB EARS Drive on a ICH10R Raid controller on my Gigabyte P55A-UD4P board. Over the past year I have had to replace a drive under warranty at least 3 months apart. Well another one died a few days ago and I put in a replacement drive which came back from warranty. I let the raid rebuild over night and when completed I rebooted windows 7, soon after the raid reported an error and it was the replacement drive, I took it out, run the WD Diag software and on the Extended test it found some bad sectors and had the option to repair them, so I did that, then zero’d the drive and put it back into the raid5 array and left it rebuild.
During the rebuild Windows 7 showed the partition on the array as offline, but some time during the night a windows update rebooted the computer. I heard the BEEP from the reboot and hoped out of bed to see windows doing a file system scan, its was going made deleting stuff and fixing indexes, anyhow after it completed doing that and windows loaded the raid was still rebuilding, later after it was finished I noticed the total size of files was down about 500gb. So i started to check everything from videos, emails, pictures, ducuments, backups and the rest. Well about then I felt a heart attack comming one, EVERY EFN File was damaged, not a single picture displays, not a single video plays, not a single email is intact.
I made a choice a while ago to use raid 5 for the protection it offered, over the year it survived several WD Greens that died. But the last thing on my mind was a replacment drive being faulty and even further from my mind was a Windows Update during the Raid Rebuild process. I know you can reboot as many times as you want without any problems with the rebuild process, I have done that many times this year, but I never expected Windows 7 to force it’s way into the Raid Array during a rebuild and go on a rampage deleting stuff. I very much hate Western Digital and Windows 7 right now. 4.6TB of data lost and most of the stuff I really wanted to keep forever was also lost.
I did have a complete backup of the array 2 months ago when I had one WD Green die, it was only a few weeks ago I cleared that backup (which was on my other PC) to make way for a bunch of home video recording from a holiday trip recently. So I lose big time. I had emails going back to the early 90’s and pictures from my first digital camera going back 10 odd years that just can’t be replaced. I can only hope now that one the 100’s of CDs I have around here that some of them have backups of data I can reuse. As for the new stuff over the past 2-3 years i’t’s now in Cyber Space Heaven.
So, if you use Raid, and you need to do a Rebuild, make sure to turn off Windows Update, or just leave it on the post boot screen without loading windows and let it rebuild safely away from Windows.
