Windows Raid 0 drive failed

[jhogan93]

hey guys, i had dual 2tb sata ssd's in a windows raid 0 configuration. yesterday my pc gave me a notification that the drive failed and to open disk management. im thinking "no biggie, just a scratch disk for my steam games". 

well turns out i cant format, change drive letter, or make a new simple volume with the drive going offline. i took out both drives thinking i could reformat them seperately. windows said no. any help would be great. windows is showing the the disk are healthy so hopefully itws just windows sucking..

 

 

thanks!

[Electronics Wizardy]

Did you configure the bios at all? If you have 2 2tb drives in windows it should show both drives, but it only shows one big volume here. 

 

Probalby need to turn off raid in the motherboard.

[spunk.funk]

How was this RAID array setup? Do you have a Hardware RAID controller? (ie) when you boot the computer, there would be a key combo pressed to access the RAID Setup Menu? 

Or did you do a Software RAID via Disk Management. or some other software? 

You can try a 3rd party utility Like Minitool partition wizard 

 

Or if you want to rebuild it, try this https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000006437/technologies.html

[jhogan93]

okay update! using the RAID control menu in my MB bios i was able to delete the array and now each drive has been formatted and has its own drive letter. Disk 2 is taking a minute to format (hopefully its find). im gonna copying some files over and see what happens . wish me luck

[jaslion]

In these cases I simply recommend you boot into a linux usb and format them that way. Failed raids in windows tend to be a mess to fix

[spunk.funk]

Sounds like Disk 2 is the Failed drive and should be replaced. 

 

[kirashi]

1 hour ago, jhogan93 said:

okay update! using the RAID control menu in my MB bios i was able to delete the array and now each drive has been formatted and has its own drive letter. Disk 2 is taking a minute to format (hopefully its find). im gonna copying some files over and see what happens . wish me luck

1 hour ago, jaslion said:

In these cases I simply recommend you boot into a linux usb and format them that way. Failed raids in windows tend to be a mess to fix

Indeed. This is why I refuse to use [consumer-grade] Hardware RAID built into most motherboards and Windows-based software RAID. Instead, I opted to go with a paid solution that functions like Software RAID called StableBit Drive Pool, albeit without the inability to access my data when one of the drives fail. I'm not affiliated with their software at all - merely a happy user for the last 8 years.

 

I have 2x 3TB HDDs in a drive pool, and 2x 2TB SSDs in another drive pool, both configured as RAID 0 read and RAID 1 write. This gives me the speed of striped writes with the protection of redundant writes. (I also have off-site backups, because we should all know that RAID. IS NOT. AND NEVER WILL BE. A BACKUP. PERIOD.)

 

I prefer this over Windows software RAID because this software makes the drive pools appear as their own Drive Letter in Windows, whilst storing the files inside a special hidden PoolPart.ID folder on all pooled disks. This means I can pop the disks into ANY OTHER SYSTEM and immediately access my files, no rebuilding of pools or RAID arrays required.

[jhogan93]

Update! both drives were able to handle a 850gb transfer each. each drive was at 100% active time for roughly 3hrs straight. all files were verifed with no errors. so im going to try to use windows raid software again. the disk is only meant as a steam/ emulation drive and yes i have back everything crucial to my NAS. im guessing the original array shit itself and i will more than likely have this issue again in the future. the original raid array lasted about 1.5 yrs and this next may also kill itself by christmas of 2025 but im okay with that. by then ill probably upgrade to higher capacity NVME drives or something of the nature.

 

thanks everyone for the help!

[spunk.funk]

Download Crystal Disk Info and /or DiskGenius in my signature. Select each disk separately and view the SMART Info. Here you can view the Health of each drive. If it ever goes below Good, you should replace it. 

You can build your RAID array from the NAS RAID setup control panel. Once RAID is setup, you can check on the status of the RAID here as well as if one of the drive fails, you can break the RAID to replace the drives.