Raid disapears after going to sleep (2 Viewers)

[AIstudio]

Hi all,
After many months of testing and getting everything finally working, I find that I now have a small issue.
I have 4 x 1TB Samsung Spinpoint drives connected to a rocketraid 2460x4 card, which is in a PCI slot.
Everything works fine, apart from when the pc goes to sleep.

When I awake it the siren on the rocket raid card sounds and the raid drives are not in the list anymore. The only way to clear it is to restart. Defeats the object really of being able to go to sleep.

I am sure that I didn't have this issue in VISTA 32???

Any ideas of maybe a setting somewhere that may be causing this???

Regards

Kev

 

[Phatty2x4]

I don't believe there is any RAID card that can support going to sleep and coming back out of sleep.

How would the RAID card keep the drives and their parity in order if the drives come out of sleep at random times? It wouldn't, you would receive either raid failure or what you are receiving now.

Out of curiosity, why use RAID, especially if you don't mind if the array goes to sleep?

Have you looked into disParity or FlexRAID Both these offer a different type of parity that are extremely effective for video storage. I currently use disparity and have been satisfied with the results.

 

[AIstudio]

I don't believe there is any RAID card that can support going to sleep and coming back out of sleep.

I was unaware of that.
The reason for RAID is for secure data storage, or so I am led to believe. I had to use a card of some description as the on board controllers don't support the LBA of 1TB drives. I have 3TB of storage space with the RAID 5 array. This is split into music, films, games etc.
I can understand why it doesn't work as the Bios on the RAID card doesn't get booted when coming out of sleep. I just wondered if someone knew how to get around that issue and maybe could boot the Bios on the raid card at desktop level?
The other main reason is that the RAID array I have is in my Media PC (HTPC) and not in a NAS or network server etc. I don't want the media center on all the time, as you can probably appreciate. I was thinking of building a server to host everything and supply the clients. This would solve the problem but would create another for me.

• Cost
• Server on 24/7 ?? (maybe its not needed to?)
• Would the server need to go to sleep so that it isn't on all the time and I would have the RAID sleep problem again?

I am looking into your suggestions now though as I have no idea what they are or do?
Thanks for the pointers I do appreciate it as I was thinking I would just have to live with this.

Regards

Kev

looking into disparity and FlexRaid.
As these are software is my logic right here.

I could backup all my data first.
Then remove the RAID card and wipe all 4 x 1TB drives clean.
I could then just connect them as individual SATA discs to the motherboard ports.
Then I could install disparity or flexraid and use say 3 drives for archiving and the remaining one for pointing at for the parity data?

If a drive died I would remove it, put in a new one and rebuild it from the parity data.

You will have to forgive my ignorance as this is new ground to me.

That would surely fix my current situation and I wouldn't need a raid card anymore

I would be very interested as to your advice.

Regards

Kev

 

[Phatty2x4]

I could backup all my data first.
Then remove the RAID card and wipe all 4 x 1TB drives clean.
I could then just connect them as individual SATA discs to the motherboard ports.
Then I could install disparity or flexraid and use say 3 drives for archiving and the remaining one for pointing at for the parity data?

If a drive died I would remove it, put in a new one and rebuild it from the parity data.

You will have to forgive my ignorance as this is new ground to me.

That would surely fix my current situation and I wouldn't need a raid card anymore

I would be very interested as to your advice.

Regards

Kev

Nothing to forgive, you have it spot on! All your questions are exactly what you would do.

RAID 5 is an excellent way to store data - be it hardware or software. There is amazing write/read speed (remember this is home use so critical database writing speed isn't needed) for RAID 5. The protection is excellent as well. You can loose a drive and your data is safe.

Issue most users run into is that they assume RAID 5 is good enough to be a back up (it's acceptable back up storage) or worse, don't keep a spare drive for hard drive failure. When a drive dies - your array is in a critical state and can't afford to lose another drive. For most home use, it's overkill (in my opinion only!). Not only that, if the controller dies, you could be S.O.L. in either getting a replacement card or the new card not accepting the array (I do realize this a far reaching idea unless you are actually using a 5+ year old card but it is possible.)

The thing that's nice with disparity is that it is a distributed parity. You may grow the protection based on the size of the drive instead of being limited by the smallest drive in your array. Since the drives are independent, you may have the drives go to sleep when not in use.

With all this being said, disparity and FlexRAID are software based. You do need a beefier system if you don't want to deal with slow downs during the parity creation/verification phase. You also want to think about either getting a motherboard that has a fast built in sata controller or purchase a PCI-E 4x or 8x sata controller. This is purely for transfer speeds and parity builds (parity building speed is dependent upon you hard drive speed and how fast the controller can write 1's and 0's).

The great thing is if a slow down doesn't bother you, you don't need to upgrade anything. You just have to realize this initial party build (much like creating the RAID 5 array) will take a while.

In your case, I would do just what you postulated - back up the data. Remove the drives from the RAID card and put them on the local sata controller. Once the drives were enabled and formatted, move the data back and then build the parity.

 

[cics]

You need hardware raid controller if you want any support for sleep mode.

Anyway, sleep mode isn't "green"
Shutdown FTW.

 

[AIstudio]

You need hardware raid controller if you want any support for sleep mode.

I have a hardware controller, its a rocket raid 2460x4 and from what i can tell so far I haven't found one that will go to sleep (S3 or S4) and wake successfully?
Would you care to elaborate on the above

@ Phatty2x4

I do have a spare 1Tb Samsung spinpoint in case one of my drives fails. The only reason I went to a Raid card instead of the on board controller was that the on board one doesn't support the LBA of large drives.
My system should be beefy enough to look after the parity creation etc (Intel Q9550, 4 x 1Gb corasair dominator Ram, GTX280OCX etc etc on Vista Ultimate x 64).
After reading some over at FlexRAID etc it seems that there are a couple of things that I am unsure of. People mention that to put data onto the drive you have no idea where that data is, just that it is on there and now protected?? I don't really understand what they mean by this?
If I was to create a RAID array say with the 4 x 1Tb drives and used my spare 1Tb drive (attached via eSATA) what would I actually see in windows? Would I just see the 4 separate drives with 1Tb of storage each. I take it I would just use them as normal IE putting music or anything else on there. Then when either scheduled, or manually, I would run the utility for the disparity or FlexRAID to update the parity etc.
Is that how it would work?
I take it I could partition drives, if needed, and I would still see them in windows as just volumes??

Interesting subject and I am sure that in the next couple of weeks I will be trying this.
I am aware that these software programs prefer the data to be static, and not changed to much. Which is why I would like to get most of my films and music ripped first.

Many thanks for clearing my mind on my thoughts so far. I know what you mean about RAID being a bit overkill for the home, although I am sure most will agree that you can't go far enough to backup a family photo collection and video footage (that was the main reason for the raid array).

Regards

Kev

 

[cics]

You need hardware raid controller if you want any support for sleep mode.

I have a hardware controller, its a rocket raid 2460x4 and from what i can tell so far I haven't found one that will go to sleep (S3 or S4) and wake successfully?
Would you care to elaborate on the above

Regards

Kev

Yes, your controller is a piece of hardware with PCI interface. But it's still a Firmware/driver-based RAID (I did google and read it specification).

Hardware controller is expensive, while software raid is unreliable. Operating system-based RAID fills the gap in between hardware and software raid. It doesn't contain a RAID controller chip, but simply a standard disk controller chip with special firmware and drive. Boot up is done by it firmware but raid controlling is done by OS' driver (Windows) or kernel (Linux).

I always advice everyone to go with hardware controller (with it own CPU, RAM and battery backup if possible). Yes, they are expensive but 4TB+ of data lost for some are more expensive than the cost of the raid controller.

My favorite manufacturer is Adaptec and for home users a 128MB RAM on board should be enough. However if you have lots of clients (or ... example bittorrents concurrent downloads), you may consider 256MB+.

 

[AIstudio]

aaahhhhhhhh I think I have it now.
I really didn't realise that there were different sorts of raid controller.
I know that there are different types of RAID ie 0,1,5 and so on. I realise now that these more expensive hardware controllers sort of have there own processor and memory on board. I take it ALL of these types of controller would allow me to put the media center to S3 or S4 and when it awakes the controller will take care of the drives etc.
I just thought that the card I had would have been able to do that, but I can sort of understand why it can't now.

SO I have to choose the best solution for this. Either software, such as disparity or FlexRAID, or hardware like this Adaptec

I suppose I have made the expected mistake of buying a card without the features needed.


Lots more reading I think.

Thanks very much for your help so far on this as it has opened my eyes to this area and I need to address this issue. A media center that can't go to sleep isn't very user friendly. As it stands right now I turn it off unless it is being used, although this ultimately means I have to wait for a full boot until I can watch TV or anything else. The option of being able to record anything during the sleeping hours is out of the equation due to not being able to put the media center to sleep.

Regards

Kev

 

[Phatty2x4]

@ Phatty2x4

I do have a spare 1Tb Samsung spinpoint in case one of my drives fails. The only reason I went to a Raid card instead of the on board controller was that the on board one doesn't support the LBA of large drives.
My system should be beefy enough to look after the parity creation etc (Intel Q9550, 4 x 1Gb corasair dominator Ram, GTX280OCX etc etc on Vista Ultimate x 64).

Sounds like you have more than enough horse power

After reading some over at FlexRAID etc it seems that there are a couple of things that I am unsure of. People mention that to put data onto the drive you have no idea where that data is, just that it is on there and now protected?? I don't really understand what they mean by this?

I don't understand this. You know exactly where you put the data. If you are referring to the information in FlexRAID where people are talking about WHS, then yes, you wouldn't (easily) know where the data was located. This is due to how WHS migrates data (which is way beyond the scope of this post).

If I was to create a RAID array say with the 4 x 1Tb drives and used my spare 1Tb drive (attached via eSATA) what would I actually see in windows?

You would see 5 dirve (i.e. D,E,F,G,H). What you could do is when you are prepping the drives, label them DATA or parity. In your case, I would label D,E,F,G as DATA and label H as parity. That way I could make an easy mental note of what drives were being used for data and parity.

I take it I would just use them as normal IE putting music or anything else on there. Then when either scheduled, or manually, I would run the utility for the disparity or FlexRAID to update the parity etc. Is that how it would work?

Yes!

I take it I could partition drives, if needed, and I would still see them in windows as just volumes??

For ease, I would suggest that you make one partition per drive.

 

[AIstudio]

I don't understand this. You know exactly where you put the data. If you are referring to the information in FlexRAID where people are talking about WHS, then yes, you wouldn't (easily) know where the data was located. This is due to how WHS migrates data (which is way beyond the scope of this post).

Aaah that explains things. I was reading a post and they were referring to WHS. I wondered what they were talking about and it was like a 747 going over my head at some distance lol. Will leave that alone as it will only confuse things.

I will use one drive per volume as you recommend and I will get all my data transferred off the system first. Then I will remove this RAID card and set it all up.

cics

I always advice everyone to go with hardware controller (with it own CPU, RAM and battery backup if possible). Yes, they are expensive but 4TB+ of data lost for some are more expensive than the cost of the raid controller.

I fully understand the logic here. To be honest I think that paying out another £200 ish for a card to do this is total overkill for me. I have all my Movies, music, games and family photos written to DVD's etc as I have been collecting for years. The only major pain I would have, if I lost everything on the Hard drives, would be that I would have to painstakingly put it all back on again. It does take a long time to rip them all to hard drive.

So to conclude so far it looks like software RAID, such as disparity or FlexRAID, is the one to go for for me. I have toyed with the idea of servers and NAS but really don't want the extra cost of building, buying and running more equipment than is needed.

Many thanks for the support here and I will get on with it and report back as to how it is working out.

Regards

Kev