Intel Rapid Storage technology saying initializing

[mambo1986]

All,

Thank you in advance for your help.

I have a raid 5 setup with 4 x 2tb drives on a onboard raid on a Asus P8z68-V LX Motherboard. This raid is only for my data and my OS is on a SSD. When I created the raid I initialized the disk and everything seemed fine however yesterday after I had to crash my PC as it had hung at shutdown for 10 minutes it is now showing initializing 3% in the Rapid Store Technology Application. It is strange as all my data on the drive is there and working as intended. I am worried as I have read that initializing will wipe the array. I have had no data loss yet will the data loss only happen at 100% completion? and will I have to find another hard drive and copy all the data off before it gets to that point. I am worried as I have a huge amount of important data on the raid and cannot afford to lose it all.

Many Thanks again in advance

Dave

 

[egilbe]

All,

Thank you in advance for your help.

I have a raid 5 setup with 4 x 2tb drives on a onboard raid on a Asus P8z68-V LX Motherboard. This raid is only for my data and my OS is on a SSD. When I created the raid I initialized the disk and everything seemed fine however yesterday after I had to crash my PC as it had hung at shutdown for 10 minutes it is now showing initializing 3% in the Rapid Store Technology Application. It is strange as all my data on the drive is there and working as intended. I am worried as I have read that initializing will wipe the array. I have had no data loss yet will the data loss only happen at 100% completion? and will I have to find another hard drive and copy all the data off before it gets to that point. I am worried as I have a huge amount of important data on the raid and cannot afford to lose it all.

Many Thanks again in advance

Dave

Sounds like its rebuilding your array. You may have a drive going bad. The data on the bad drive is being rebuilt using the parity bits on the other drives, You may want to find a replacement drive and let the array rebuild once you find the bad drive.

 

[mambo1986]

All,

Thank you in advance for your help.

I have a raid 5 setup with 4 x 2tb drives on a onboard raid on a Asus P8z68-V LX Motherboard. This raid is only for my data and my OS is on a SSD. When I created the raid I initialized the disk and everything seemed fine however yesterday after I had to crash my PC as it had hung at shutdown for 10 minutes it is now showing initializing 3% in the Rapid Store Technology Application. It is strange as all my data on the drive is there and working as intended. I am worried as I have read that initializing will wipe the array. I have had no data loss yet will the data loss only happen at 100% completion? and will I have to find another hard drive and copy all the data off before it gets to that point. I am worried as I have a huge amount of important data on the raid and cannot afford to lose it all.

Many Thanks again in advance

Dave

Sounds like its rebuilding your array. You may have a drive going bad. The data on the bad drive is being rebuilt using the parity bits on the other drives, You may want to find a replacement drive and let the array rebuild once you find the bad drive.

Do you think the data will be safe if obviously only the one drive is going bad.

Thanks

 

[egilbe]

That's the point of RAID 5. You can lose one disk in the array without losing any data. Just find out which disk is failing and replace it.

 

[popatim]

No thats not the point of any raid!
Raid is meant to keep your system up when a disk dies; it does not replace the need for doing backups!

Right now you have a corrupted array thanks to the hung shutdown. The array is rebuilding and if anything happens during this time all your data is gone. Luckily you didnt have 2 or more corrupted disks.

Arrays keep you up, backups save your ass.

 

[FireWire2]

All,
...
Dave

You are OK.. let it rebuild, You should back your important data into another storage device, NOW
The chance of 2 drives failed at the same time is VERY rare, but it happens

 

[egilbe]

No thats not the point of any raid!
Raid is meant to keep your system up when a disk dies; it does not replace the need for doing backups!

Right now you have a corrupted array thanks to the hung shutdown. The array is rebuilding and if anything happens during this time all your data is gone. Luckily you didnt have 2 or more corrupted disks.

Arrays keep you up, backups save your ass.

Who said anything about Raid replacing backups?

 

[Hawthornecub]

Intel Rapid Storage v12 and higher no longer erases data to initialize a raid array. So if you make a raid 5 or 10 array in Bios, and start using it, restore from backup etc, it will not have the benefits of raid 5 - as in no checksums, etc are being generated.

Initializing will do a rebuild and sync all the drive(s) data and create checksums. This USED to be a destructive process. It no longer is.

My my Alienware R4 this is the case. It IS destructive on my R3.... but I downloaded the bios from my R4 and put it into my R3 and then upgraded my R3 to the latest drivers and software.. now it can use drives over 2TB ... and I can initialize w/o loosing data

But fault tolerance should NEVER be used in place of backup. One reason: It can't replace corrupted or deleted files (or changed files). Other than that, it does REDUCE the need for backing up data, but it doesn't replace it. Plus with raid 5, only ONE drives can fail at once (chances of 2 are RARE). I STILL have a 20TB USB 3.0 external raid array That's raid 5 to protect my backup data Between fault tolerant raid PLUS REGULAR full + incremental backups, you are GOLDEN. YoU should never lose a file or data again.