Raid drive not spinning up

[Glavinsolo]

Howdy

• Maxtor Shared Storage II raid drive

• drive is 1TB Seagate ES.2

• When connected drive has a tick up and a tick down sound

• Ticking repeats

• I pulled the drive from the external unit and plugged it into my normal rig

• Drive still ticks

• Drive comes up in startup and is recognized

• Computer boot process stalls due to the hard drive that didn't spin up

Drive is formated with EXT3 - I have a program to recover linux formatted data. I believe the raid format was spanning not striping.

Solutions?

 

[corkyg]

Confusing - spanning is more commonly called mirroring. RAID usually implies two or more drives, but you refer to only one drive. A single drive RAID array makes no sense. Please clarify. What does your RAID BIOS show in the boot sequence (usually before the OS starts loading.)

 

[Glavinsolo]

Originally posted by: corkyg
Confusing - spanning is more commonly called mirroring. RAID usually implies two or more drives, but you refer to only one drive. A single drive RAID array makes no sense. Please clarify. What does your RAID BIOS show in the boot sequence (usually before the OS starts loading.)

Howdy,

Raid 0 - spanning, means that when 1 drive fills up it starts on the next. So you see 1 physical drive when 2 (or more) are present.

This is a commercial storage solution by maxtor called the shared storage II and is 2TB. We had a blackout and the external unit lost its raid array configuration without the option to rebuild. Only option the company will give me is to send it back.

It is linux formatted and configured as Raid 0 spanning. So I popped open the enclosure and pulled both drives. 1 drive is making the ticking noise I described, the other is fine. I will probably need both drives to rebuild the array in my windows box to recover the info.

 

[corkyg]

In general,ticking in a drive suggests forthcoming failure in most cases. OK - I see what you have.

RAID

Looks like your best option is to send the bad drive back. You will lose whatever is on it, but the other should be OK.

 

[RebateMonger]

A ticking disk is a failing disk. Time to replace it.

There are three common two-disk "RAID" arrangements:
Mirroring = RAID 1
Striping = RAID 0
Spanning = JBOD

If there are two 1 TB disks and the total capacity of the array is 2 TB, then the drives are either striped or spanned.

If they are striped and one disk fails, then all the data is lost. If they are spanned, then only the data on the failed disk is lost.

That link about "striping versus spanning" is incorrect. Well, the last poster in that link got it right. Spanning is NOT mirroring. Mirroring is mirroring.

 

[Paperlantern]

My thoughts exactly Rebate... Mirroring is Mirroring, spanning creates one volume but writes data to one disk at a time until one is filled then moves to the next, no performance gain, striping writes to both disks at once, increasing performance, but, as was stated, if one is lost, everything is lost. Mirroring is another thing altogether that duplicates one disk exactly to another disk for redundancy, spanning and striping are not intended to be fault tolerant, they only increase space/performance.

As for the drive, it may be toast if its ticking. Freezing drives contracts the parts and can sometimes get dying drives to keep one foot out of thier grave long enough to pull data off of, but thats it.

 

[Glavinsolo]

Yeah, wife is in tears. this contained all of our honeymoon pictures/video.

 

[Paperlantern]

There is always professional data recovery if you can't see it by just hooking it to your machine. Yes it is expensive, but if the data is worth tears, it might be worth dropping a few hundred on. Maybe do it on the side and surprise her with it later =)

 

[Glavinsolo]

These are all ext3 partitions when I look at the one good drive. Then there is a large partition 930mb that says raid. I can't remember exactly if it was set to raid 0 or JBOD. If it were set to JBOD would this partition come up as RAID?