Question RAID disk usage (Active Time) at 100%, slowing reads to a crawl

[thuff]

I've had a RAID1 working flawlessly for several months now, and last night, after a failed update that was automatically rolled back [on Windows 10 Pro], it developed a serious problem.

It's a single RAID1 used for data only as my D drive. Whenever I try to access the RAID disk, it's usage (Active Time) jumps to around 100% and stays their until I stop tried to use the drive but Read Speed and Write Speed mostly stay at 0 except for small spurts where it goes up to 3-8 m/sec (as displayed on the Task Manager). It's taking about 10 minutes to copy a Gig at this point. Even opening a directory with only a few files in it sends the disk usage to 100% for a couple seconds, and sometimes it even takes a second or two to load the director in File Explorer. All other drives on the system are still working fine.

When I boot the "Intel Rapid Shorage Technology - Option ROM", the RAID1 status "Initialize" instead of "normal." This would lead me to think is verifying or rebuilding or something, except that when I leave the drive alone usage falls back to 0%.

I'm baffled by this. And making a backup under these conditions seems like it would take several months.

Details:
Intel Rapid Shorage Technology - Option ROM 11.0.0.1339
Capacity: 7452.0
Partition Scheme: GPT

Intel Chipset SATA RAID Controller - Driver Version 15.2.0.1020 [9/13/2016]

Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77-V Deluxe ATX Motherboard (so about 5 or 6 years old now).

Any help or additional information on what might be going on would be greatly appreciated.

 

[thuff]

I'm wondering the best course of action. I'm trying to back it up to a external HDD via USB. Should I

1. leave the computer on for a while and see if it runs it's course, like for a scan or rebuild?
2. Disable one of the RAIDed HDDs via the Intel Rapid Shorage Technology - Option ROM
3. Manually disconnect one of the RAIDed HDD.
4. pull one of the RAIDED HDDs out, put it in a drive mount shell, and plug it into a different computer?
5. any other ideas?

 

[thuff]

Lastly, I noticed that even when the Drive activity is registering 0% on the RAID (and the other drives). The Drive activity light is on, (not flickering but solid blue), which leads me to believe again that it is doing a scan or rebuild and that a flaw in Task Manager just assumes the drive activity is zero when the OS isn't making any requests to it. Can anybody verify that?

I'm guessing and hoping that's what's going on and that I should just leave the computer on till it finishes. But the question is, how long will that take for an 8TB x 2 RAID?

It's been on all day now and so far no data appears to be missing or corrupted.

Anybody have a guess as to what's really going on though?

 

[alceryes]

First and foremost, backup your data. I know it may take a while but, if the data is critical, you shouldn't care.
Once data has been backed up try removing one drive or breaking the RAID to see if writes and reads to a non-RAIDed drive return to normal. Test both drives like this. If they work fine rebuild your RAID.

 

[thuff]

First and foremost, backup your data. I know it may take a while but, if the data is critical, you shouldn't care.
Once data has been backed up try removing one drive or breaking the RAID to see if writes and reads to a non-RAIDed drive return to normal. Test both drives like this. If they work fine rebuild your RAID.

I'm definitely going through and backing up the most important stuff, and some of the most resent stuff. Problem is, at 10+ minutes a gig, it will take about 7,000 days to back up all 8TB. Plus, that can't be good for the hard drive.

The main thing I've learn here is just how bad Intel's software is. It originally came with monitoring software for Windows 7, but it no longer works in Windows 10, they don't support it anymore, and now no one can find out what the hell it's doing.

 

[thuff]

So after about 10 hours, the problem finally fixed itself. Thank God.