PC RAID0 Issue

[Roady]

Hi

I have a PC with a RAID 0 setup with two identical Raptor hard drives and from time to time keep getting a windows "popup" in vista that one of the RAID Drives has reported problems. Also the PC sometime want boot, i have to run the setup disk to repair the bootable sector, this is always succesful and you reboot and all ok for a while.
The RAID utlitity on the POST reports all is healthy to both Raptors and the RAID is ok.
When the PC does not boot and reports Disk Error and goes no further until I reboot and fix the boot problesm from the Bootable Vista CD.

Have I a possible faulty Hard drive on its way out or will it be the Vista Install. i have had the OS now for 12 months or so.
I have also updated the RAID drivers which seemed to off sorted the issue out for couple of weeks but now it happens again!!!!

Any comments much appreciated.

[Paul Komski]

If you are having to regularly "fix" the boot sector it doesn't sound healthy but the reason for its recurrent corruption is not at all obvious. Personally I have no time for a two drive RAID-0 on nearly all host controllers. The problems generally well outweigh the minimal advantages.

[Roady]

So would you think one of the drives is on its way out.

How can I check both drives when they are in a RAID config? As I downloaded the WD Raptor diags but does'nt see the drives as their in RAID so cant check them.

Thanks

[Paul Komski]

So would you think one of the drives is on its way out.It's a possibility though one might expect the RAID to be broken if this was the case. I don't really have a better suggestion other than image your important partition(s) onto a large enough external drive and then test the drives individually but no-longer configured as a RAID. Restore later because if you have a utility that can image the system it should be equally able to restore it. I recommend BiNG (in my sig).

Striped RAID arrays are not all they are made out to be unless running on high-end expensive host controllers. IMHO "run of the mill" RAID-0 limits one rather than embellishes one's system.

Is your array on-board or on an expansion card?

[Roady]

Ok thanks for that.

I have backed up my PC System using the VISTA backup\restore wizard to an external hard drive. Now I understand that, if I was to break the RAID in the BIOS to split the drives so that I could test them the O/S would then have to be restored to make it back as it was.
However going off what you have said about RAID I might just not bother with it and install a fresh copy of VISTA without RAID at all!!. Only thing this way is that I will have tio re-install everything!!!!

My mobo has an on board controller and not a riser card.

cheers

[Paul Komski]

I just don't know how effective Windows own backup/restore is but there appear to have been problems with Win7 at http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=71464.