Raid 0 'Failure'

[thatschronick]

Hello all,

I have an older gaming rig that was sent to me from my cousin over a year and a half ago that has been running almost flawlessly since then. The parts he included in it were a motherboard, case, and 2 WD Blacks setup in RAID 0. I have the correct drivers and utility tools installed as well. About a month ago I've been receiving an error on the first HDD on startup... Cousin said its fine to continue using but that I should invest in an SSD soon. As of a few days ago my computer starting having issues running alot of windows services correctly and I had alot of my applications start crashing on me frequently. My first assumption was malware but after a few scans and purges it continued. After a few fresh restarts to the system my second HDD is now giving me the same error issue. Is this a common issue with 'dying' HDDs? I ran Intel's RST tool and its reading that the drives have a SMART failure on both. Windows boots just fine though.

Do my symptoms match up with the HDD failure?
I will be buying a SSD very soon and my data is backed up.
Do I break the RAID and keep the HDDs as backup drives or are they tanked?

Sorry for the long post, thanks in the advance.

 

[cdabc123]

even one disk beginning to fail will mess with a raid 0 array. i would assume at least one is going bad. when you get your ssd test each drive individually to see if they are good.

 

[iamacow]

Run HDTune and you can find out if your drive had bad sectors. But yes SMART errors means something is wrong with the drive(s). hard dive failure can be anything from starting with bad sectors, head crashes to slow reads in certain spots. I've seen it all and dealt with it all. Best thing to do is back up your stuff while you still can. If you can't do that use those drives as little as possible until you get that SSD or replacement.

This is why Raid-0 is never good for critical data....

 

[4745454b]

I would also stop using the machine. Once you have a non raid drive hooked up, backup any data you care to keep. You are about to lose all info on those drives.

 

[jovcenaum]

My advice, first replace SATA cables (choose better quality cables, at least different manufactures)
Second : From RST mark it as Normal
On the end find some tool to fix bad sectors. It is big question for me how to fix it under Raid 0.