Disk Mirroring Keeps Failing

[B16CXHatch]

So, I've been having a strange issue recently. I have twin WD RE4 500GB hard drives that I like to run mirrored within windows (software RAID 1). I used to do this on my old Windows 7 Pro PC with the same drives no problem for about a year. When I built this new one, I originally had regular Windows 8.1 so I ran the drives in hardware RAID 1 since Home versions of Windows don't support drive mirroring. Well, I replaced my old Samsung 840 Evo boot drive with a Samsung 950 Pro NVMe drive. With it, I switched to 8.1 Pro and decided to go back to soft mirroring.

Now here's the problem. Basically this keeps happening at random when shutting down and restarting my computer:

Disk 2 keeps showing up as foreign and the mirror gets broken. If I remove the mirror from Disk 1 and import Disk 2, all the data is there on both drives. I then have to either delete the volume of one of the disks and re-mirror or delete both, create an entirely new mirrored volume, and recover from a backup image.

After this happened for about the third time, I put my hard drives through a buttload of tests and they both passed with flying colors.

Also, I decided to just say screw it and go back to hard RAID 1 but when I tried that, my computer was very unhappy with me apparently. My 950 Pro was no longer seen as a bootable device. Switch back to AHCI and it happily boots again, which is odd cause this shouldn't matter. It's an NVMe drive. Not SATA.

So, anyone have any ideas? Do you think it's my motherboard, hard drives, Windows, or maybe even my PSU/SATA power cable?

Thanks for any insight.

Oh, and my specs:

EVGA SuperNOVA 850 G2 Modular PSU
ASUS Z97-A/USB 3.1
Intel Core i7 4790K
Corsair Dominator Platinum 16GB DDR3 1866
Samsung 950 Pro 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD
SilverStone ECM20 M.2 to PCIe x4 Adapter
WD RE4 500GB SATA HDD x2
EVGA GeForce GTX 770
Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional

The USB 3.1 is disabled to allow my third PCIe x16 slot to be enabled for my sound card, the M.2 slot is disabled, the 950 Pro is mounted on an adapter that is plugged into the 2nd PCIe x16 slot and the video card is in the top PCIe x16 slot. If any of that means anything.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there, B16CXHatch!

I'm really sorry to hear about your issues with the RAID-ed WD RE drives. I'd strongly recommend you to refer to the Disk Management troubleshooting steps from MS here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc787481%28WS.10%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396#BKMK_12
More specifically, I'd strat by reconnecting the HDDs and repair the mirrored volume using these steps: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc758072%28v=ws.10%29.aspx
You should also try reactivating the dynamic volume and making sure that it's online through DiskPart as well: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785259%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

Hope these help you. Keep me posted with the troubleshooting!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[B16CXHatch]

Well, I'm not 100% convinced it's the drives but I was already wanting to do an SSD upgrade anyway. So, I have a pair of SanDisk Ultra II 480GB SSDs on their way.

It seems that it's constantly Disk 2 that keeps showing up as foreign. That's actually the older of the two drives (they are the same model but I didn't buy them at the same time). Thing is though, both drives pass every test I throw at them. One thing that kinda has me leaning towards it being that one drive having something wrong is the fact that it's the same one that keeps showing up foreign. Even when I switch which SATA ports they are plugged into. Disk 1 never shows up foreign, just failed.

If the SSDs do the same thing, then I'm just going to pull one of them and put it in my PS4 and just do backups on my PC more often (I know RAID 1 is not a back up, it just helps reduce downtime). When the new SSDs do come in though, I'm gonna pull the remains of my old PC out of the closet and test the old HDDs mirrored in both 7 and 8.1 to see if anything happens then.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Great idea, B16CXHatch!

Meanwhile, I'd also recommend you to try using the WD's Data LifeGuard Diagnostic for DOS. Once you create a bootable flash drive with the software, you'd be able to troubleshoot both of the WD RE drives without booting into any OS. If there's anything wrong with either of them, you'd be able to see it without the OS interfering with the results. You should be able to find a link to the DOS version of the DLG software on our website, once you specify the WD product here: http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=cMiukm

Let me know how it goes! Good luck!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[B16CXHatch]

Well I'm glad to report, there's nothing wrong with the old RE4 drives. I'm glad cause I still wanted to use them for external storage. Unfortunately, that means there's something wrong with either my motherboard or the way I have it set up. My new SSDs are not working right either. A new kind of weirdness is happening. What happens now, is after a restart, still whichever one is Disk 2 gets wiped completely. The plus side is that it's mildly less inconvenient because the other drive can still be read without removing the mirror. Instead of saying straight up Failed, it says Failed Redundancy. But like I said earlier, Disk 2 now instead of showing up foreign like the HDD did, the SSD just gets wiped.

Like I said, my guess is something is setup wrong. It may have something to do with the new 950 Pro NVMe drive but I'm just not sure. I'm thinking about resetting the BIOS completely and seeing if that fixes anything. It did exhibit some strange behavior in my final attempt to run hardware RAID 1 on the old HDDs. I got the computer to boot once with the 950 Pro and RE4s in hardware RAID 1 but only through the boot menu. I restored from an image on the HDDs, restarted, and couldn't get it to boot anymore. I switched back to AHCI and it booted again but here's the weirdness. The RE4s were still showing up as a single Intel RAID Disk which shouldn't have happened. Last time I switched from RAID to AHCI, the drives showed up as separate drives with all the data intact. This time I had to re-enable RAID, go into the Intel RAID menu and remove the drives from the RAID array and switch back to AHCI after that. The drives showed up separate again, but blank. I get the feeling the RAID controller might be messed up somehow and causing this but again, I'm not sure. This is some seriously strange behavior.

If I can't get this working right, as much as it makes me cringe, I may try to RMA my motherboard, or just buy another one. This could be an indicator of a bigger problem. This is already the second one as the board I originally started with (MSI Z97 Gaming 7) burned out in only an hour. I really don't want to do another board swap.

 

[B16CXHatch]

Also, new info. With the new drives in and using SanDisk SSD Dashboard, I noticed that it would sometimes report one drive as having only a 3Gbps link speed. This is something I wouldn't have noticed on the RE4s as they are only SATA II drives, not SATA III. I first thought, maybe something was wrong with the SATA ports I have it plugged into but I had the problems on my old drives no matter which of the 4 regular ports I had them plugged into. I figured plug them into the two SATA ports on the SATA Express connector. It would have been a lot of trouble to move those cables around the way I have them managed so I went pulled a pair of them from my old PC. That's when it dawned on me, it could possibly be a bad cable (though that wouldn't explain the weird RAID behavior earlier). I still plugged the cables from the old PC into the SATA Express SATA ports anyway. It caused the drives to need to resync but both showed up, neither foreign, neither blank, just needing a resync. Once they resync, I'll restart it several times and give you an update.

*OK, so far so good as far as the drives staying properly mirrored and all. My new problem which I believe I will take up with SanDisk is that one drive that keeps showing up randomly with a link speed of only 3Gbps. It also has a weird firmware version that seems to be newer than what their support site says (site says X31200RL which the one drive that always shows up 6Gbps has, but the weird one shows X41100RL).

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Hey there again, B16CXHatch!

I'm glad to hear that the Mirror rebuilt successfully without any issues! Resetting BIOS might help you solve the other issue, but it will also get your BIOS settings back to factory defaults so you'd need to reconfigure everything afterwards.
Another thing you should check (if you decide to go for it) is your motherboard manufacturer's website and make sure you have the latest BIOS firmware update for your model. Some outdated BIOS versions have trouble with the proper detection of SSDs.
Speaking of firmware updates, make sure your SSD is up-to-date as well. Here's something that you might find useful: http://www.storagereview.com/how_upgrade_ssd_firmware

Keep me posted!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[B16CXHatch]

My motherboard has the latest BIOS and so do apparently the SSDs. I'm currently talking with SanDisk support on my drives. I'm almost willing to bet I'm gonna have to RMA at least one if not both of them. One works perfectly fine and has the latest firmware according to both the support site and the support tech I'm talking to. The problem is the website's registration page tells me its S/N is invalid. The other one's serial number shows up as valid but has a firmware version that it shouldn't have apparently. It's not old. In fact its version number would indicate that it's newer than it should be.

Other than these problems and the fact the one with the weirdo firmware drive keeps changing link speeds when I restart, they work fine. The mirror is now stable (hasn't broken once since last swapped cables), the speeds are fantastic (when the weirdo one shows up at 6Gbps), navigating my files is so much more responsive now, and my system is quieter. I will say though, If I buy more SSDs in the near future, I'm probably gonna stick to Samsung. I had real good luck out of the two 840 Evos I own, and the 950 Pro is doing OK so far as well.

 

[Fastdruid]

I don't have a solution. I do however have *exactly* the same issue and interestingly on the same make and chipset motherboard... (ASUS Z87-Pro)

I have a pair of identical 1TB disks (Western Digital WD1000FYPS-01ZKB) mirrored. Every time Windows 10 crashes it loses the second disk, marks the mirror as failed with the second disk missing and then rediscovers it as a Foreign disk.

Re-importing it brings both the mirrored disks back online and loses the "missing" disk but both are now independent disks. I then have to destroy the second one so I can rebuild the array from scratch.

It was fine under Windows 7 but then I skipped 8 and 8.1, I think it's a bug in Windows but as mirroring is pretty rare in non-enterprise versions of Windows it's just not getting looked at.