Raid 10 ? ISSUES HELP.... (RESOLVED)

[invader980]

im pretty good with computers .... this thing has me at a lost im on the edge of returning it only because ive run out of things to try and (data).
(warning long story coming )

I purchased the s4 a few days back from fry's electronics after hearing some good things ran it in a 2 disk raid 0 (seagate 2tb sata 2 X2) ..... flawless for a few days...

this is where the fun starts lol , well i purchased it to expand my raid to a Raid10 (after a dataloss on another system) . Figured id just pop the drives in and see wat happens ... if i will even have to play with settings . So i did just that "Modified" the raid to add the 2 new disk this started a little bit of lagging on the system (to be expected its moving alot of data... so i thought ) and go to sleep .

8 hours later i wake up to check progress only to find out the "Migration" is stuck at 0% and its running hot. On top of that no hdd leds , cpu load under 10%..... ok? At this point im scared, my only option is to turn it off and possibly destroy my raid . Which i do and it dose ..... no biggy data is backed up.

So... im back at square one , i come up with a another idea , Read the log :) lol. This contains nothing but time out errors and the error that the migration failed @ 0%....

Maybe its not good at migration .... ok ill start all over the EASY way . I build a new array Raid 10, formats and done working fine. I began ftping my data back to it over night , could be worse .... i let it run over night . 3 in the morning i wake up to the horrid BEEP BEEP BEEP (roll my eyes) .... here we go again .





Jul 26 03:21:19 WARNING Rebuild on array 1 aborted at 0% because of error
Jul 26 03:21:19 WARNING Disk 1 unplugged
Jul 26 03:15:59 INFO System is starting to work.
Jul 26 03:15:59 INFO System was shut down abnormally.
Jul 26 03:01:26 INFO System is rebooting.
Jul 26 01:03:38 WARNING RAID status: "CRITICAL". The S4 (nas) volume "/VOLUME1" is not functioning correctly.
Jul 26 01:02:13 WARNING Disk 1 unplugged

Almost like the drive lost power during the transfer and errored out ... so it attempted to rebuild the raid array ..... and boom major error

This time indicates one of my drive has failed ( same drive its been streaming video from for the past few days in the raid ) With a red led on it ..... hmmm ok ? On top of this the raid is sort of limping along , not stopped but running horribly laggy . So no biggy im running a raid 10, i pull out the bad drive .... regain my speed and all is OK ( Maybe by some fluke the drive is bad ... we will see). So i follow up by testing the drive in my test system. No issues S.M.A.R.T dosent even display warnings , drive test 110mb/s read speed (shockingly better then i thought for a 5900 rpm).

Now Im convinced my drive id been running for months before this S4 came in my life is ok..... so i pop the freshly formatted drive back in ... Drive checks out ok ... rebuilding array ( actually starts rebuilding array this time ).

This is as far as ive gotten 8% into the array rebuild ...

My Question is :
A) Am i doing anything wrong here ?
B) has anyone run a raid 10 in this thing before
C) anyone else having issues with raid functionality ?
D) any other ideas on what i can do to narrow down the issue ?


the one other check i did was in 2 independent arrays ( which i didnt realize i could do), only because i pulled a raid NO.. NO.. I Purchased 2 different drives to complete the raid 10 (Hitatchi deskstars 2tb cool spin) Even sata 3 ... Wow that dose sound bad.

So to test compatibility i ran 2 different raid arays , Hitachi vs Seagate if u will .Then copied data to them at the same time from 2 different sources .... ran for 2 hours with no issues on either array.

E) THIS IS THE ONLY FAULT I CAN THINK OF could that be causing my problem?
F) Is this a support forum ? I couldnt find much on the way of support on the site other then the normal "Contact us" and because the product is so new and generally just works lol theres almost no info on the web about it .

I REALLY want this thing to work for me but it refuses to lol, thanks in advance for the help ....


Confused new Patriot Costumer:confused:
Sean

[kevinkar]

F) Is this a support forum ? I couldnt find much on the way of support on the site other then the normal "Contact us" and because the product is so new and generally just works lol theres almost no info on the web about it .
This probably isn't a support forum in terms of Patriot people participating though that's not necessarily out of the question. It's more a user forum which is still good but not as good as a Patriot person helping out.

As for your other issues, check the drive compatibility list (posted here somewhere in the forum and on Patriot's site) to see if your particular drives are supported. Also, you noted 5900RPM drives which ultimately might be too slow for full RAID capabilities. You should always try to use the fastest drives possible. I think Patriot prefers we use "enterprise class" drives but I can't/won't afford those and had to push myself to buy 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT drives which should be good enough. So you may want to check that.

[invader980]

This probably isn't a support forum in terms of Patriot people participating though that's not necessarily out of the question. It's more a user forum which is still good but not as good as a Patriot person helping out.

As for your other issues, check the drive compatibility list (posted here somewhere in the forum and on Patriot's site) to see if your particular drives are supported. Also, you noted 5900RPM drives which ultimately might be too slow for full RAID capabilities. You should always try to use the fastest drives possible. I think Patriot prefers we use "enterprise class" drives but I can't/won't afford those and had to push myself to buy 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT drives which should be good enough. So you may want to check that.

Is there an actual support forum ? i mean i hate to bug u guys with my probs even tho u seem eager to answer lol ... thanx by the way .

I was under the impression that people generally didnt use enterprise drives anymore for raids other than for the fact that they wouldnt have to change drives so frequently. I mean with the cost of drives , capacities and the speeds they run at , I mean 100mb/s from 1 drive is amazing . Running that in a raid 0 could out preform some solid states now days. Hell i've had enterprise level samsungs that only gave me 80mb/s output ( 1 Drive that died by the way in less then a year would not recommend them to anyone).

U maybe right tho i didnt test access times (or atleast pay attention to the test) when i tested the drive. I dont have any spare drives to test with now after my data failure :(.

My understanding of raid 10 ( i may be wrong its been a while) is that the drives r ran as 2 sets of raid 0 strips . IE:

drive Raid#1=Striped(A+B) Raid#2=Striped(C+D) so that RAID#1 and RAID#2 r redundant in case of any drive failer 2 out of 3 of the remaining drives can rebuild the new .

in that sense if the drives were to slow for raid 10 that would mean in raid 0 the same 2 separate arrays should experience the same issues, as raid 10 is simply striping X2. Shouldnt the controller be the limitation if they work separately in raid 0 fine? (this is getting geeky now lol)

Ive read the compatibility list .... i understand the hitachi's are not included this is why i tested them in there on array in the inclosure they seemed to operate great.

all of this is confusing .... maybe ill return them n try the same seagates instead before i give up on the s4

[BadIntentions]

The western digital 'RE' series drives are considered Enterprise drives, and have very little price premium on them.

For RAID, you really should use very similar drives. Make sure the RPMs, Cache, and sector count match. If any one of these is off, performance will suffer because the array has to wait for the slowest drive in the array. If the slowest drive is TOO slow, the array drops it as defective because it isnt answering fast enough. This is due to the enterprise style raid controller inside the javelin (it even supports SAS/Serial Attached SCSI).

[invader980]

The western digital 'RE' series drives are considered Enterprise drives, and have very little price premium on them.

For RAID, you really should use very similar drives. Make sure the RPMs, Cache, and sector count match. If any one of these is off, performance will suffer because the array has to wait for the slowest drive in the array. If the slowest drive is TOO slow, the array drops it as defective because it isnt answering fast enough. This is due to the enterprise style raid controller inside the javelin (it even supports SAS/Serial Attached SCSI).

Makes perfect sense .... thanks for the reply .. so ill give that ago if the rebuild causes issues again(crossed fingers) ... :( i tryed to get as close to spec as possible lol There both 32mb cache 5900 rpm same size .... BUT sata2 vs sata3 ( y would u even have sata3 for such a drive ? lol ) and makes sense y it threw an error that the drive failed.

as much as technology makes our life easier .... its also complicates it beyond belief lol

[invader980]

For thoes who care :

It was in-fact the hard drive going bad ... The s4 was right all along , all the random issues were a result of that 1 fualty drive, now also being RMA'ed.


For the record these Hitachi coolspins Sata 3's are compatible .... and have great speed in this enclosure .

Ended up using a DOS version of Seatools to diagnose the drive failed (for good this time not even limping along any more )

After much doubt Javelin gets my vote again :D

i went decades without a bad drive ... and in one week i lost 2 raid arrays to rma , i was so cocky i was running all raid 0's lol LOST EVERYTHING n 1 week . lesson learned

[kevinkar]

Is there an actual support forum ? i mean i hate to bug u guys with my probs even tho u seem eager to answer lol ... thanx by the way.
Nope, I think this is it. Anything more official will be between you and Patriot by using their support process here:

http://patriotmemory.com/support/supportRequestp.jsp

If enough people buy the product and eventually find themselves here, this will be come a de facto support forum but still user generated. It's hosted by Patriot so it would be nice for them to populate it with a technical person but that seems to happen less and less these days. You want to be careful because sometimes they can get pretty strict with what is allowed and what isn't.

An example is the Lasersoft SilverFast forums (a scanner software company) who reviews every posting before it's posted so that they weed out questions they want answered by a full on support ticket system. That means the question and answer is between YOU and LASERSOFT and the question/answer is never posted for everyone to see which makes the support forum moot. If I have a question that someone else might have, it SHOULD be posted for all to benefit. I can see why they want to assign ticket numbers and track certain questions officially but to forbid the posting from being seen by all who could benefit is just silly. So I'd hate for this forum to become that strict.

If you can't get an answer here, there's no reason you can't ask Patriot directly though so that's good.

[BadIntentions]

And patriot does have Patriot_Ben here if something becomes an RMA/etc issue.