[SOLVED] Raid 1 drive vanished

[griffinsclaw]

I've had a RAID 1 setup on 2 seagate 3TB drives going for about 3 months now without an issue until today.

Today, my computer restarted unexpectedly when I stepped away for a few minutes (possibly unrelated). Soon after I noticed my raid drive wasn't showing up. I expected one of the drives had failed, but disk management does not show the drive as failed and in rebuild mode. The drive isn't there at all.

I ran some experiments:
BIOS and CrystalDiskInfo can both see 1 drive
playing around with sata and power cables, one of the drives is not being detected by bios or CDI and the problem isn't the cables
I removed the bad drive completely and put the original cables back in the (presumably) functional drive, but the drive isn't being seen by disk management or the hardware manager (CDI and the BIOS do see it)

From what I've read, if one of the drives in a raid fails, disk management should say so, right? Could this possibly be normal behavior and I just need to put a new drive in to get it to start working again?

Windows 10
drive https://www.newegg.com/p/1Z4-002P-000D0?Item=9SIA5AD7C84259
mobo https://www.newegg.com/asus-tuf-sabertooth-z170-s/p/N82E16813132715?Item=N82E16813132715
cpu https://www.newegg.com/intel-core-i5-6th-gen-core-i5-6600k/p/N82E16819117561?Item=N82E16819117561

 

[RolandJS]

Because RAID is not a backup, did you have current backup images on external media?

 

[griffinsclaw]

Because RAID is not a backup, did you have current backup images on external media?

I don't have any backups of that drive. was kind of banking on raid functioning as intended.

 

[ex_bubblehead]

I don't have any backups of that drive. was kind of banking on raid functioning as intended.

You may very well have had a 2 drive failure, or, one drive failed and took the filesystem on the other drive with it (it happens). RAID is never to be used as a substitute for proper backups.

 

[Jimz Fix It]

Griffinsclaw-
We also use a similar setup, although with 2) 1tb Samsung SSD's setup as RAID1.
The sole purpose of my setting up RAID1 was to eliminate having to re-O/S when a drive craps out, which they do.

My computer experience goes back to the days of 10 meg HDD, and I've re-O/S'd so many times over the years, I'm just over it.
Been running Win10 now in my Dell computer since 2012 without a re-O/S, and have had to swap out a failed SSD drive more than once. It reports during the Bios message if the RAID is good or if a 'member drive' has failed.

So....even though I have Carbonite doing a continuous backup, the RAID setup is valuable to maintain up-time.
As for your particular failure, I don't have enough savvy to diagnose. But for me, the RAID1 gives peace of mind.
Jim

 

[griffinsclaw]

Update:
plugged both drives into a third sata port to the same results

Plugged both drives into another system. Drive 1 showed up as an unknown device, so diagnosis of borked drive is probably correct. Drive 2 was recognized and the data was fully accessible, so that drive is fine.

Best guess now is some sort of hardware problem with the mobo? I'm going to get a new drive and an enclosure and see what happens. I'll backup to an external first.