Rapid Storage Technology
Intel® RST, RAID
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[Help] Intel Rapid Storage Technology: One Drive Failing, Wanting To Upgrade

KHowa
Beginner
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Hello, everyone. This is the first time I've ever posted here, but I've been using the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (passively, of course) for about four years. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to really afford an upgrade to my computer system until now, so some of this may be outdated (I'm not sure, I couldn't even find a support forum for IRST here). A friend actually helped me put this into place in order to provide some redundancy to my family photos and videos after I experienced a horrible data loss debacle with one of Netgear's "Stora" storage solutions. What he did was used one of my older 1 TB hard drives, and we purchased two more of the same size. Raid 5 seemed the best option, because if one drive had issues it would be rebuilt - and it if failed completely, I could insert a new drive really quick to get the data copied over to a new drive. The problem is that , nearly every day, I get a "volume degraded" error and IRST starts a rebuild after a drive fails. While I do have backups on DVD, I am very scared of losing this data as it contains a treasure trove of images of people that I love dearly and will never see again (they are deceased).

 

What I would like to do is ask the community if you can do the following:

  1. Assist me in determining which drive is failing (the "Activate port LED" on each port doesn't seem to work?).
  2. Assist me in the best way to upgrade each drive without losing the data that is already on the array.
    1. Currently, the total space on the Raid 5 volume is 1.8 TB, with only 13% of the disk being free.
    2. I would like to upgrade the array so that each disk has a total capacity of 2 TB, which with 3 disks should give the entire volume a size of 4 TB (before being reduced by cache sizes, etc).

I've taken screenshots and uploaded them to an album on Imgur (a photo-sharing site). The link is here: http://imgur.com/a/zaZPB# 0 Intel Rapid Storage Technology Raid 5 Array - Album on Imgur

Thanks, everyone.

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Jose_H_Intel1
Employee
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I moved your thread to

Intel® Rapid Storage Technology only checks the integrity of the volume and not of the Hard Drive themselves. I recommend asking the hard drive manufacturer for a diagnostic software tool and whether or not this tool allows checking the drive that is part of a RAID array. Otherwise you will need to break the RAID array in order to test each drive for bad sectors. The RAID option ROM also shows failed drives by pressing Ctrl+I during POST.

You can accomplish both goals by replacing all members with higher capacity drives. You will need to rebuild after replacing each one.

You can use Windows* Disk Management to increase the volume size as explained in the Help section of Intel® Rapid Storage Technology; go to search and look for "Increasing Volume Size".

Adding a fourth drive to the RAID 5 array will not increase the capacity as explained in the table of the RAID migration article. Remember to back up your data before doing any change to the array.

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-023081.htm Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) — RAID Volume Data Verify and Repair

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-020670.htm Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) — User Guides

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/CS-029274.htm Intel® Rapid Storage Technology (Intel® RST) — Troubleshooting RAID Migration Issues

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