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The RAID-0 in question is run by an Intel RAID controller in a Gigabyte Z77X-D3H. It is a 2x320GB RAID-0, comprised of two different model drives. The working one is a 320GB Western Digital (whose model is not currently viewable) and a Seagate 7200.11 model ST3320613AS. The RAID controller reports that the Seagate drive has failed, and listening to it make a strange warbling noise repeatedly seems to confirm the diagnosis.

However.

After dropping it in an external USB dock (in which it didn't make the warbling noise) and doing some research, I began a sector-by-sector copy using HDD Raw Copy Tool 1.10. The Seagate is currently being duplicated to a much larger 1TB Western Digital. At one point it stalled for a few seconds and displayed "Read Error occurred at offset 1,530,855,424; LBA 2,989,952 (Uncorrectable error)", but then continued on its way (as the tool's website advertises it can do) and has yet to throw any more errors. It seems as though the Seagate is suffering from a bad sector, and hasn't outright died, however I'm not sure how to fix this and I'm wary of making any attempts lest I screw up its status in the RAID.

Thus, my question is, since I am apparently able to create a clone of the dying Seagate, can the drive it's being cloned to take its place in the RAID-0 array? Or the is the original drive the only one that can be there? Solutions found so far have been to copy all the data off the failing array to somewhere safe, but that is not currently an option as the machine the RAID is in has so far refused to boot if the Seagate is installed.

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  • Once a raid 0 drive has failed you are usually out of luck since is is not really raid and has no redundancy. Only remedy is to try and recover the data off the failed drive by a professional service, even then it may not work in the raid o array.
    – Moab
    Jun 4, 2015 at 21:49
  • Since you have unreadable sectors and no redundancy data will have been lost. It you have backups that create a new array and restore from backup. If not then cloning it might lead to a workable situation but with dammaged file(s). Also, I am not sure how the fake RAID solution will deal with different size drives. It should not be a problem for RAID/stripe, but the IRST implementation may very well barf on it.
    – Hennes
    Jun 4, 2015 at 22:46

1 Answer 1

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Unfortunately, you have fallen foul of one of the many problems with RAID. Especially with modern, high density, low quality (e.g. cheap) disks.

The more disks you put in a RAID array, the more likely you are to get a failure and disk failures are very common in cheap drives.

So you have used RAID 0 to get a speed improvement but have at least doubled the risk of a catastrophic failure. As you've also discovered, many RAID controllers are a lot more fussy about the health of a disk than a desktop or laptop controller.


So your only hope is that your disk copy has been faithful enough to ensure that the array will still be valid when you put the new disk in. There is no guarantee I'm afraid.

Make sure you create the new disk as a true clone of the old - which means making it the same size and ignoring any additional space.


For future reference, I personally recommend only ever using RAID 1, 0+1 or 6 for home/small-office devices. Even then, I recommend disks designed for use in those situations & not standard desktop drives. I would also recommend matching drives. RAID 0 & 5 in particular are a recipe for disaster.

In addition, everyone should remember that RAID is not a backup. You still need backups, ideally both on-site (for speed of recovery & in case your cloud backup provider goes bust) and off-site (for local disasters such as fire, flood, robbery, etc.).

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  • This particular RAID-0 wasn't supposed to contain any irreplaceable data, hence my using it. The idea was to set it up so games would load faster, and anything important they involved was backed up elsewhere. Unfortunately an oversight on my part led to my screenshots and savegames archive being stored there, resulting in the current mess. After this recovery effort concludes, regardless of outcome, I will likely be recreating the RAID-0, this time keeping my archives in a safer location.
    – SaladKing
    Jun 6, 2015 at 0:43
  • No problem, it can happen to anyone! You might also want to look at SSD's for speed instead of RAID0 Jun 6, 2015 at 10:52
  • Perhaps someday when they're cheaper; got a bunch of other upgrades to make beforehand. The worst part is that I've had a friend's LTO-3 tape drive and eleven 400GB accompanying tapes sitting here for three months, but we still haven't gotten it to work reliably yet. If I'd put a bit more effort into that, I'd be in a much better position!
    – SaladKing
    Jun 8, 2015 at 3:14
  • Just wanted to remind that SSD's can now be cost effective against RAID for some configurations. In regard to the tape unit, maybe that should be another question! Jun 8, 2015 at 7:54

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