Areca Raid Halting during load

[warzer]

I have an Areca 1220 Raid controller with 4 drive raid 5 and 2 drive raid 0.
win7 x64 12gb ram, x58 motherboard 920 proc default settings.

Recently i have been having strange system hangs when trying to copy files from raid 0 to the raid 5 drives. or even just heavy use on either. the problem is the problem is getting worse requiring less and less activity to cause the hang. windows doesn't crash completly but explorer crashes and never comes back. i loose browse ability on drives connected to the raid.
System events is reporting
The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk3\DR3. but i am not sure what that means or how to identify what drive it is. there are 50 or more of these errors. my raid controller is not reporting any issues with the drive.

after the simi hang windows cannot properly shut down it hangs on logging off screen after forced shutdown. I have to Force Poweroff to get my system stable again.

My possible guesses for the issue are Power as reported by Areca support or a drive is dieing (as this is similar to an issue i had in the past). all the drives in the raids are seagate's 4x1tb and 2x360Gb.

the last time i had this issue it was with certain model numbers of the seagate 1tb drives. strangely enough the drives identified in the past work fine as standalone but hang in raids.

Any ideas how i can troubleshoot this issue?
Thanks
War

 

[Rubycon]

Have you looked at the event log in the RAID console itself?
SMART status on all drives?

 

[warzer]

I looked at the even log on the card. it normaly reports if there are smart errors. at least it did once. I am not sure how to view the smart log directly tho. any suggestions?

This is the smart data i found:
Device State Normal
Timeout Count 0
Media Error Count 0
SMART Read Error Rate 119(6)
SMART Spinup Time 99(0)
SMART Reallocation Count 100(36)
SMART Seek Error Rate 84(30)
SMART Spinup Retries 100(97)
SMART Calibration Retries N.A.(N.A.)

and
Device State Normal
Timeout Count 0
Media Error Count 0
SMART Read Error Rate 100(6)
SMART Spinup Time 99(0)
SMART Reallocation Count 100(36)
SMART Seek Error Rate 84(30)
SMART Spinup Retries 100(97)
SMART Calibration Retries N.A.(N.A.)

note below the data:
The SMART Attribute(Threshold) Is A Normalized Value, The Value Is The Larger The Better.
If The Attribute Value Is Smaller Than The Threshold Value, The Disk Is In Unstable State.

Edit: so i removed the raid 0 2 drive set and thought it was better for a while, but its back. trying to make space on a standalone drive by copying it to the raid 5 caused it to hang again. I was able to run a scandisk on the raid0 and it didn't report any issues.

If it is a power problem how would i troubleshoot it? i have a 1000w corsair psu with a noisy fan in it. A replacement is incoming for the fan noise but how would i know if its actually going bad?

 

[Emulex]

cooling. i noticed some areca come with fans on their chipset.

put your hands (de-static!) on the core chips and see if you get burnt.

 

[warzer]

its defiantly warm but its not burning hot. Yes it does have a fan and its always on. My case has descent airflow so I would hope that would keep it within operation temps. the hardware info i get from the card does not give me temps for the card itself my my harddrives seem to be 36-38C. Before my current case they ran close to 50C.

 

[Rubycon]

Check cabling and verify settings.

It's a PIA but you should also check your drives independently while connected to AHCI. Most drives have a utility available for download to check health and media surface, etc.

 

[yinan]

On another note, do not use SSDs with Areca controllers. I had 3 of them running in RAID 0, and he controller would lose the array 90% of the time after reboot. It wasnt a problem with the drives because they were brand new and they are running fine using the Intel on board raid.

 

[Idontcare]

On another note, do not use SSDs with Areca controllers. I had 3 of them running in RAID 0, and he controller would lose the array 90% of the time after reboot. It wasnt a problem with the drives because they were brand new and they are running fine using the Intel on board raid.

Arecas run fine with SSDs. Yours is the first I've heard otherwise in 2+ yrs. Usually the controller only drops drives if the drives stall out and don't respond to the controller's requests.

If you are using the old micron-based controller SSDs then this is very much a possibility...but it is because of the crappy SSD and not the controller's fault, it needs to monitor for failing drives and micron-based drives happen to cause a lot of false-positives due to their own poor design.

 

[yinan]

I have 3 of these and the Areca 1222 controller.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820250002

Brand new ordered last week.

 

[Rubycon]

No problems with ARC1680ix series with Indilinx, Intel G1/G2 series here.
Latest firmware is 1.48.
Load latest STORPORT driver dated 6-10-10. (updated package on ftp site 07-19-2010.

 

[warzer]

Well I have some more info. running a scandisk on my raid5 array I finally caused a disk to fail. after replacing it with a new one and rebuilding my system apears to be stable again. but its only been a few hours since the rebuild. after i verify its stable i will put my raid 0 back in the system and report if the issue is fixed.

i really hate when drive fail but don't completely fail.