out of sync raid mirror woes

[super gnu]

i recently migrated by raid 1 mirror set to a new machine. initially i didnt have space for both drives so i used one of the pair for a few days, intending to start a fresh mirror at some point.

i got around to adding the second HDD, and was offered the option to rebuild the array. GREAT i thought! i wont have to wait for the whole 980GB to sync to a new drive, just the handful of unique files i created since spitting the mirror up.

so i ran the rebuild (intel rapid storage) and it took HOURS (about 5)


then when i restarted i got a warning that chkdsk needed to verify my disk. i let it. it took HOURS, finding loads (thousands) of errors and "fixing" them.

now apparently my raid array is fine, but in 2 days ive already found DOZENS of max files that refuse to open and a load of corrupted rars. not looking good. i cant imagine what proportion of my files are damaged, but im not sure what to do.


any suggestions? or am i screwed...?

moral, DONT LET RAID1 GET OUT OF SYNC THEN EXPECT IT TO FIX ITSELF>>! MAKE A NEW MIRROR.

[plastic_]

Moral is, don't use raid at all, it's a can of worms and there is no real benefit for normal setups.
I also had a raid-1 nightmare once, when the hardware controller died and I couldn't find a replacement that would accept the disks.
raid-1 is not like backup, it's often the opposite actually.

[super gnu]

ahh i have a backup too, but i generally copy off from the mirrored drives when they get full.. im going to look into something a bit more automated now.

i foolishly assumed that since both machines had intel raid controllers in them, and the drivers/software were the same, and it recognised the raid array, and offered to rebuild it, that it would just work. what a fool :P

luckily im between jobs and have backups of pretty much everything critical. may have lost a few of my recent job files though. pretty sure they wont be coming back though.

[andybot_cg]

A few years back I had been using a mirrored raid setup when one of the drives got corrupted (it was during a swap as well.) It was a nightmare! I was able to use some software to read the files on the drive, but not perfectly. I too had a backup, and ended up just getting a few critical files from the raid, but then starting from the backup drive. I toasted the raid setup and started over with two simple volumes. I've just been using a sync software with daily backups to keep the drives mirrored. The added benefit is that there is also a versioning backup (the software saves a copy of everything that is overwritten, I just keep a week or so of those files before purging older overwrite backups.) which has come in very handy a few times. Never have to worry about a corrupt raid again.

Andy

[super gnu]

which sync software you using?

[andybot_cg]

I use synkron, but I recall there was another thread about sync software and there were several other suggestions.