So I went out to look at a video server the other day that had degraded raid issues. I've read about the various raid levels and how they are supposed to work, but the behavior I witnessed here has me a bit baffled.

The Raid 1 drive was marked as degraded. The system actually incorrectly id'd the culprit drive (verified by chkdsk), but what was really weird was it looked like the raid stopped trying to mirror the two drives months ago, but only gave an alert a few days ago. There are no files or event logs younger than 5/14 on the bad drive. It's boot-able, but has a tonne of bad sectors that are causing rampant blue screens.

Finally, since the good drive was marked as degraded, the system wouldn't boot from it, the raid had to be broken (after file backup!) and then a new one created live in the Intel matrix manager.

Is this behavior the result of the slow death of the bad drive? Is it anomalous? Is it something I may expect to see again?

Thank you,

  • 1
    What type of hardware, software or hardware RAID? – SpacemanSpiff Aug 14 '14 at 21:16
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    @SpacemanSpiff I can see from the question that it's fake RAID, as this is what "Intel matrix manager" controls.. – Michael Hampton Aug 14 '14 at 21:19
  • Software I believe, given the Intel Matrix Storage Manager, however due to service agreements I've never actually seen inside the box (to see if there is a dedicated card). – Sidney Aug 14 '14 at 21:33
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    Yeah, I would say it's a fake RAID, too. And no, this is not a normal behaviour a RAID should have but fake RAID sucks. You have the disadvantages of a Hardware-RAID (being controller dependent) but no advantages of it (having little to no CPU usage because the controller handles the calculating). I hope this was not the case on a live server machine. Whoever installs a server with a fake RAID (even if he wants to save hardware costs) should be slapped. – Broco Aug 14 '14 at 21:50
  • Could it be that you lost one drive a few months ago (the one you're trying to boot from now) and you've just lost the second drive. – Glen Aug 15 '14 at 0:32

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