What can cause file corruption, RAID errors and more!

[Helevitia]

My new Asus P5K mobo was causing me problems and during troubleshooting I started getting a "cable read error" with one of my raptors. This showed up in BIOS before booting into Vista. After bootign into Vista, the intel software complained of the same problem. My first thoughts that since I was having so many problems with my sata ports, that the error probably would resolve wit a new mobo.

Anyway, I "RMA'd" the mobo and the raid error on disk 1 was still there. I swapped cables, tried different ports, etc... problem would always follow the raptor. On top of that, with the new mobo, now it complained that the "OS was missing" upon boot up.

I planned an advancement replacement fo the drive on Monday, but since I had some time over the weekend, I decided to start from scratch with the RAID. As soon as I reset and started over, the error went away!

So my question is, can an error show up on a hard drive from a bad sata port and then a reset of the raid setup "reset" the error so that it no longer exists? BTW, I have been using this setup for almost a week now with no more problems since I replaced the mobo. This is question one.

Questions 2.

Yesterday I downloaded and started to install BIOSHOCK and it complained of corrupted files during install. I tried to "RETRY" and it continued on until it was done, but the install didn't complete somehow. I reboot my system and try again and this time it works, wtf?

The only thing I can think of is that my overclocking is somehow causing problems with the raptors? Thoughts?


I can't remember question 3...

[VJ]

I've had a painstaking time with my raid solely due to one bad cable: it caused one hdd to yield a bad sector, which in turn made the raid go critical... (I know it was due to bad cabling, as the harddisk themselves support internal mapping of bad sectors: the host should never see bad sectors on these disks; main problem in diagnosing was that the problem was intermittent...)

Is your bus also overclocked? Perhaps the raidcontroller doesn't like this...?
(some cards are quite critical when it comes to bus speed)


Jörg

[Dr Mordrid]

I use RAID's extensively and experience has taught me to never OC a system that has one internal by bus timing; it screws the cards timing. As VJ said RAID's are often a bit twitchy when it comes to that.

Externals that have their own embedded controller and only attach by USB, IEEE-1394 or eSATA are another thing.

[Chucky Cheese]

Great Thread!!

the concerns this thread raises leads me to ask a question...when i set up my raid 0 drive(3 x 500GB * 7200rpm * 16MB cache each) each sata drive was connected to its' own port on the marvell 61xx raid controller built int the mother board...would it break the raid if those drives are attached to different ports on the same controller??

cc