Hello,
I run a DELL Precision 370 in RAID 1 mode (Intel 8280 SATA RAID). OS installed is MS Windows XP pro SP3.
It used to contain 2 WD10EARS (SATA) drives, but a defective one has been replaced by a WD10EARX drive, a few months ago. So now it now uses one WD10EARS and one WD10EARX.
For a few days, at each IPL, the MS Win checkdisk starts on one of the logical drives, always the same one, afterwards the RAID goes into rebuild status, which takes a few hours to complete.
I suspected a hardware problem with one of the drives and tried to run the WD DLGDIAG for Win (level 1.0.0.1).
Alpthough the diag program displays an IDE (!) physical drive, I launched one aftter the other both the quick test and the extended test. Both of them stopped very quickly with a “cable test read diagnostics sector error; test failed” msg.
Questions :
1/ Is this diagnostic program relevant to this configuration (IDE vs SATA) ?
2/ If yes, does the message mean that one of the physical drives is defective ?
3/ Then, how could I determine which of the two disks is defective ?
Thanks for any idea or suggestion.
DS
Hi ok first of all WD green drives are ment for second storage solution not for raid. To use Raid you need drives that are the same different drives with different firmware will cause problems. Yes the WD dos test program should have bios set set to ide mode for the drives to be tested. You can try a copy of Hard Drive sentinel to test the drives it will give you a report as soon as it starts up and it is a windows based test program works well.
Hammey wrote:
Hi ok first of all WD green drives are ment for second storage solution not for raid. To use Raid you need drives that are the same different drives with different firmware will cause problems. Yes the WD dos test program should have bios set set to ide mode for the drives to be tested. You can try a copy of Hard Drive sentinel to test the drives it will give you a report as soon as it starts up and it is a windows based test program works well.
All types for raid soltion (firmware, software and hardware) should all be able to handle different hdds (size, manufacturer, firmware, etc) in a single raid array without these errors.
I have not used WDs testing utilities yet, but they might run into problems when using them on hdds running in a hardware or firmware raid array, due to the lack of compatibility/drivers with said raid solution. So in order to properly test the drives, I recommend thoroughly checking them with RAID disabled. Keep in mind though that this can corrupt the data on the disk(s), so make a backup or something first.
