I have 4 320gb drives in a RAID5, all was fine, i shut down and left to go camping overnight and now when i got home and turned the computer on all 4 drives are magicly offline members.

This is an absolute disaster, over 500GB of data is offline and there is no actual problem with any of the drives or the PC, why are all 4 drives suddenly offline members and how to get them online ? the Intel matrix RAID is not detecting the RAID5.

I really seriusly please need help. If you know anything please help !.

I only have 120gb of data backed up. (the major data)

You do not want to be useing raid 5 on a software raid setup in the first place.

I fail to understand what you are saying or how it helps me bring the drives online.

Maybe i am just lucky but after reading about someone who was having issues with theyr ICH8 RAID5 simply set one of the drives to non raid got theyr Array back in degraded mode i set the drive in Port2 to non raid and rebooted.

It worked, i gotmy array back in degraded mode... much better than nothing at all, but now despite the drive in port2 working perfectly and showing no actual SMART failures the Matrix storage console refuses to use the drive to do a rebuild saying that it may have reported a SMART status or Failure or its a system disk.

it is niether of those 3 yet it says it may be.

I just formatted it without issue by itself.... used it, it runs fine yet it has a problem. im so confused.

You don't understand because he was not trying to be helpful nor does he understand raid.

The ICH9 raid controller is a hardware not software raid.

Perhaps Intel would respond via E-Mail.............
http://supportmail.intel.com/scrip [...] e.aspx?id=

I could not find anything on their site.

I did see a few posts from other people with similar issues, but the result was always a rebuild.

Umm... Maybe I'm not understanding you zenmaster. The RAID controller is hardware, however the software does ALL of the work. There's nothing on the ICH9 that actually calculates the parity data and all that junk. It's handed off to the CPU thereby making it a software RAID.

The other reason I know this is because if it was a hardware RAID, that motherboard would instantly cost alot more because of the XOR processor needed.

I managed to fix this finally without loosing everthing.

when i remembered that one time about a month ago one of my drives fell off the RAID array for no reason during nothing more than a reboot, i selected that drive (on SATA port 2) to be the one i selected to reset to a non raid disk.

thanks to that i got my raid back in degraded mode.

the saga continues when i got back into windows and was not allowed to re-use the drive for my raid array.

I tested the drive in a few ways and found nothing actually wrong with it but i suppose thats 2 strikes your out on that drive so i swapped it with a freinds spare 320gb he had in a PC but no data on it, nice guy eh ?

im now happily doing the rebuild and have not lost any data, not out of the woods yet, but as-long as it gets to 100% im happy.

I am going to be doing a better set of backups and keep an eye on this raid, to be honest im not impressed with this onboard RAID5, in all my years dealing with HP proliant servers iv never seen this kind of stupid behaviour from a RAID.

That stupid behavior is what you get from software raid systems and you do not want to be running raid 5 on any software raid setup.

This is why I'm looking for a dedicated RAID Controller when I set up my RAID. Hopefully, I can find one that will be able to support the new 1TB Samsung drives to be released in November and also offers very good read/write performance for under $300.

Yeah, Raid isn't really worth that much hassle. If you were to do a price per frame (take your pick of a game here) comparison, raid wouldn't come first.

Think about it another way: you spent say £200 on a good graphics card, another £200 on a good processor (maybe less after hunting) and another £400-£600 on other components. Now considering that you could spend £75 on quite a good hard drive, will the extra money you'd spend on raid compute to better gaming?

Probably not. Remember to factor in your time and mental health. Raid is time consuming, more likely to fail than a single drive and it costs more. If you take all that time rebuilding arrays and spent it playing games, you'd be having more fun for less money. Don't forget the energy savings.

My own experiences with RAID have been a lot less than stellar. 2 months after I placed my order for new parts have passed. I'm still not sure if this system is stable enough to hold any important data. This is because RAID isn't a backup. It's a lot easier to do a weekly backup for a tenners worth of DVDs than spending another £75 on a second hard drive. Sure, RAID 1 is great but you still need to back it up.

In my own case, I have had 2 dead drives and 1 reformat inside the same month. Originally I started out with 2 Samsung Spinpoint T166 500gb drives. They have both since failed. When the first one went, I bought 2 new ones. Why 2 you may ask? Well RAIDed drives tend to behave like apples. When one goes bad, it rots the whole barrel. And wouldn't you know it, the other drive I bought has now failed aswell, 2 days ago. Luckily, the first failure RMA got back to me today. Sadly, I'm now looking at a 28 hour rebuild.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should

If I'd known 2 months ago what I know now, I would have bought 1 750gb drive. Windows XP would install without so much as raising an eyebrow. No need for special drivers that might cause BSoDs, random crashing or messing around with the bios to set up raid in the first place. Sure, it might not be the 931gb with redundancy I have now, but I would be able to rely on it.

I have labeled my drive Saga in recognition of all it has taught me. Perhaps you might do the same?

RAID - Rarely Advantageous Impending Disappointment.