What happens if I unplug my RAID 10?

[riccardi50]

So I've been having issues with my RAM recently and it has been crashing my computer. I want to figure out why 2 sticks of RAM works but not 4. The problem is that every time my computer crashes my storage RAID 10 gets all jacked up and has to rebuild which literally can take 1-3 days. The RAID 10 is using the software controller that came with my ASUS Rampage Extreme V mobo.

So what happens to my RAID 10 if I just unplug the SATA on the 4 drives and run the computer? If I later on plug them back in will the computer recognize them as the RAID 10 again? I only ask because I can't image backup this RAID because it would be too big of a file for what I have laying around and I really don't want to break the array accidentally and lose everything on the 4 drives.

Thanks for the help!

 

[audiospecaccts]

Software raids would never be reliable on non-ecc ram. Also, overclocking would make the raid unstable as well because of timing. Unplugging the drives won't do anything but give you an error on the bios screen saying its not connected.

 

[riccardi50]

Software raids would never be reliable on non-ecc ram. Also, overclocking would make the raid unstable as well because of timing. Unplugging the drives won't do anything but give you an error on the bios screen saying its not connected.

Very interesting. I've never heard that OCing would make a RAID unstable. Could you explain more? Thanks so much for the help.

 

[audiospecaccts]

Software raids would never be reliable on non-ecc ram. Also, overclocking would make the raid unstable as well because of timing. Unplugging the drives won't do anything but give you an error on the bios screen saying its not connected.

Very interesting. I've never heard that OCing would make a RAID unstable. Could you explain more? Thanks so much for the help.

Software raid relies on the system timing. When the system is clocked higher than its stable operating point (when the cpu starts drifting in frequency on its own) the clock signal becomes distorted, and causes internal data errors inside the read and write frames of the SA (serial architecture) digital media stream. The driver, which is a process instead of an embedded environment on a card, has to pause all operations pending to the drive, and retry the corrupted media frame. This causes the system to slow down intermittently. Now in the worst scenario, the data retry is corrupted, and after it retries so many times (depending on the driver's internal settings) it will accept the corrupted data and the raid stack starts to degrade. Because the data flow usage of the system hardware. The system hardware must maintain stability or risk corruption. So sometimes I can see people blaming viruses, or the specter bug when in reality, they went too far with thier overclocking and after a while the raid falls apart in some places, that the system tries to correct the small data errors, and the system performance drops until it totally falls apart.

One thing to keep in mind about the drawbacks of software raid:

Software RAID tends to be slower than hardware RAID. Since some processing power is taken by the software, read and write speeds of your RAID configuration, along with other operations carried out on the server can be slowed down by it. Software RAID is often specific to the operating system being used, so it cannot generally be used for partitions that are shared between operating systems.

I build muti-track audio computers that record high sampling rates (96K-192K). I can not use any form of software raid because it takes up a lot of real time clock instances away from the OS that causes hardware timing issues because it can not maintain a sustain transfer rate of I/O. Independent measurements that I've done reveal a drop over 50% compared to hardware controllers. The drive technology does come into play too, as a 6Gb/s SATA (half duplex SA) drops to 5MB/s and 12Gb/s SAS (full duplex ) drops to 8MB/s on software where hardware maintains 30MB/s SATA and 150MB/s on SAS on its drives.

 

[USAFRet]

"So what happens to my RAID 10 if I just unplug the SATA on the 4 drives and run the computer? If I later on plug them back in will the computer recognize them as the RAID 10 again?"

It might work. Probably will work.
But what if it doesn't?


Your data should always have a recoverable backup. With a software based RAID, doubly so.
What if your PSU died, and killed your motherboard?
"it would be too big of a file for what I have laying around" is not a viable excuse.

 

[audiospecaccts]

Basically, you should never overclock. If you have to overclock for a program or an operating system, its junk (the software or operating system). Address hardware performance issues correctly. This could be as simple as moving one of those integrated features off to an expansion card. (like networking, or hard drive controller)