possible drive dying in RAID 0 array

AdamH96 · January 5, 2018

Recently one of my drives have been a bit unstable (WD Blue 500gb in port 4), it has come up with multiple S.M.A.R.T events, blocks with media errors are 100+. I have been suppressing them as i only have some games on this drive and they been mostly ok, i have been noticing large stutters and few crashes (mainly project cars), so i am ok with it failing. but i am not sure if it is the drive failing, this started to occur after i reinstalled win 8.1 and cleaned out my cpu rad and gpus and i did some re cable managing. so i am having a hard time pin pointing this to a drive, cable, or a port, and how can you know if a drive is dying?

Also, i bought 2 new WD blue 1tb drives to replace the raid 0 array, one of the drive had a bit of a hard time formatting as it came up with error could not finish formatting, working now but this is making me wounder about the cables as they are older cables from my dad, guessing about 10 ish years old. iv been swapping sata cables.

kb5zue · January 5, 2018

Before total drive failure, best thing you could do would be to backup your data. And if one of your new WD Blue's is screwing up, if it is new, then the best thing you could do with it would be to RMA. And grab yourself a couple of new SATA cables to connect the drives. And why Raid 0? If a new cable does not correct the problem, and I personally don't think it will, then for sure RMA the drive in question. But for sure back up your data, first thing.

AdamH96 · January 5, 2018

7 minutes ago, kb5zue said:

Before total drive failure, best thing you could do would be to backup your data. And if one of your new WD Blue's is screwing up, if it is new, then the best thing you could do with it would be to RMA. And grab yourself a couple of new SATA cables to connect the drives. And why Raid 0? If a new cable does not correct the problem, and I personally don't think it will, then for sure RMA the drive in question. But for sure back up your data, first thing.

i use raid 0 for any games that i don't put on my ssd but still want some decent transfer speed. i have a raid 1 array for all my important files to have backed up.

i think i might buy a bunch of new cables and see what happens.

KirbyTech · January 7, 2018

On 1/5/2018 at 6:47 PM, kb5zue said:

Before total drive failure, best thing you could do would be to backup your data. And if one of your new WD Blue's is screwing up, if it is new, then the best thing you could do with it would be to RMA. And grab yourself a couple of new SATA cables to connect the drives. And why Raid 0? If a new cable does not correct the problem, and I personally don't think it will, then for sure RMA the drive in question. But for sure back up your data, first thing.

For files like games a RAID 0 is decent if you need storage and have a large number of games. Reason being it is just the pain of re-downloading everything not an actual total data loss like if you lost you resume, pictures ect.