Rocket Raid 2314MS - RAID 5 Failure - Won't rebuild with new drive

So what happens when you choose "Unplug" on the failed drive?

Or delete on the failed drive?

Does that make room for the spare to be added back in?

The underlined word Maintenace in the first screenshot looks a lot like a link or a "button". Is it clickable? Does it take you anywhere worthwhile?

GJLiberi wrote:

Hello Everyone,

This is my first time on the Apple boards, so please be gentle.

All drives are seen and initialized by Highpoint GUI. New drive has been initialized in Highpoint Web GUI and added to Spare Pool.

The drive with the redundent data on it is intact.

This card is supposed to recognize when a drive fails and rebuild to the spar drive immediately. NOPE!!

I have a 2314 but use it in a RAID 0 as a capture scratch disk. Since it's a RAID 5, you should be able to continue to access the drive data. I would backup all critical data before doing any troubleshooting/experimenting.

In the Web GUI, under Settings, do you have the card set to auto rebuild?

My screen indicates I'm using Web GUI 1.6.8. If I go to Manage -> Devices, at the top of the list of devices it says "Controller 1 (RocketRAID 231x/230x Controller v2.5)". I did update my BIOS once, it was very confusing and I think I ultimately booted my Mac into Windows to do so. It was a couple of years ago so I'm not sure. I don't think I could ever figure out HPTs instructions and the file they provided wouldn't accept in the Manage -> Devices screen. I don't think updating the BIOS would erase any data but I wouldn't do it unless all the data was backed up or non-critical.

Our interfaces may look different because I have a RAID 0 instead of a RAID 5.

I don't think using a SATA III drive should have a significant affect either, but that really would be a question that HPT or the enclosure manufacturer could answer.

I think what concerns me most is that you said the rebuild completed about 78% of the way and failed. That implies to me that you may have 2 hardware issues. At this point we're beyond my level of expertise, if HPT does not respond you'll probably have to go the disaster recovery route.

Sorry I couldn't be more help. I wish you the best of luck in your data recovery.

If it went 78 percent and failed, could the new drive have a Bad Block there?

Consider erase with Option Zero out data (one pass). This takes several Hours, but assures 100 percent good blocks on a new destination drive.

The evaluation for a RAID5 (shortened to 5 - read 3, 5, 6, 10 and 50) hardware card should mostly center on the quality of the management utility. You are going to spend double or more for a decent mature RAID utility with a high quality PCIe card.

You won't find any of them connect to port multiplier eSATA enclosures. Highpoint is the only one that did that. It isn't that that is the wrong way to do it, but pretty much any high end RAID host is going to be Enterprise quality and you will find no Enterprise solution uses eSATA port multipliers. Mainly this is reliability of the connection/connectors. MiniSAS, Fiber, and iSCSI (for PCs) is much more rugged connection with locking connections of substance. I don't have any issue with eSATA for what it is. It works great. I just don't believe there is a quality hardware RAID card to be found that uses it. Your port multiplier enclosure may serve perfectly attached to a plain old pm capable SATA host card as the backup. You will have to rewire it to get it to attach to a quality RAID card.

A good RAID utility has functions you do not have currently. Force mount, recovery and repair tools not present in lower quality RAID utilities are essential components of a good RAID5. This takes years to develop. RAID 5 is complex. If corrupted a RAID5 is virtually impossible to recover unless the type of failure is accounted for in the RAID utility and the utility has a script to repair that specific failure. Sadly most of the cheap garbage marketed to consumers is completely lacking in these functions. (most of the time the only support you will get is to tell you to reformat it and copy the data back)

In my opinion, right now the quality RAID manufacturers that support Apple are ATTO, ARECA and CalDIgit. Like anything, there are strengths and weaknesses with each.

ATTO is a big 'class act' outfit and their cards truly are and cost 'Enterprise', with a capital E. Their support is excellen and they make high end software to run it. They are no slouch in any performance or quality standard you can pick. The words 'port multiplier' do not exist on ATTO's website.

Areca is based in Taiwan, which puts an US distributor between you and them for support. The US distributor and many integrators selling the cards do excellent support. The cards are quite a bit less costly than ATTO. They run mainstream Intel processing and push the performance envelope.

CalDigit only works with their own storage enclosures which locks you into buying their boxes - something I refuse to do. That said, they have a decent utility and hardware quality is generally excellent. They also are owned/based in Taiwan, but their US based inhouse support is very good.

The one most important aspect of RAID5 is that it is no magic silver bullet of storage. RAID5 is marketed as the holy grail. but that is all BS, and, well, marketing. By itself RAID5 adds no data security. What it does is add uptime in the event of a drive failure. This can be critical, but is not nearly enough. Only a real backup provides data security. More important than selecting the type of RAID card you use is deciding on how you back it up. The more important the data the more critical the backup quality is. The more dynamic the data the more real time the backup must be. This is the most important consideration when setting up your storage system. Much more important than whose RAID card is running.

Do your research. Define your needs - how big, how fast, how much you can spend. Then find someone you trust to supply it. Go with a manufacturer known for support - you already stated that goal and it is the right priority.

And best of luck on your data recovery! Hope it all comes out well.

Rick

Ricks ricks@macgurus.com wrote:

By itself RAID5 adds no data security. What it does is add uptime in the event of a drive failure. This can be critical, but is not nearly enough. Only a real backup provides data security.

I would say that only a proven implemented backup plan provides reasonable data security. I can't help but remember a news article several years ago where an Alaska State government department had a technician perform an update to their system which destroyed their data. The tech than performed the same update to their online backup destroying that data too. The offline tape backup wasn't ever double checked and wasn't readable either. Fortunately the paper records remained and they manually re-entered all the data.

No backup plan is 100% fool proof.

That said, I have to say I politely disagree with the statement "By itself RAID5 adds no data security" since you can suffer a single drive failure and not lose data (assuming the RAID5 is properly implemented). It's just a matter of what level of security the user is looking for since nothing/no one can ever absolutely guarantee 100% data security.

Hey George,

Thank you for the kind words. I am happy to help. I did not jump in on your troubles earlier because we stopped working with Highpoint long long time ago - now I don't know enough about their products, and especially their management utility, to assist.

What we are carrying now for Hardware RAID cards from ARECA are the 1223-8X and the 1882x. As far as I know, no ARECA Hardware RAID cards support port multipliers. The 1223-8x specifically states it does not support SATA port multiplier. The 1223-8x is < $700 card, 1882X is < $1000. The high end 1882 has 2 of the fastest Intel processors and is really overkill unless running multiple SAS Expander chasis and lots of drives. Takes lots more than 8 drives before you start realizing the performance that the 1882X card is capable.

The non RAID MIniSAS card does support port multiplier. We use the 1320-8x. It has 2 x 8088 MiniSAS connectors and can run up to 40 SATA drives on max 8 port multiplier boards. Card is capable of around 700 MB/sec. Software RAID only of course. They also make a single 8088 connector version of this card, I never brought any of those in.

We got into a program with ARECA where we get 3 year replacement card service. Because of this we pay a bit more for our cards but we also can get an enterprise customer a replacement card if theirs gets corrupted or has a problem we cannot solve ourselves. This is a new service from ARECA, used to be we had to send a card in to get repaired and if it was a version we no longer stocked then I couldn't supply a replacement myself. No one can afford to have their enterprise storage down for a couple weeks. So well worth the added cost, in my opinion. That was my biggest complaint with them and paying a little more resolves this. Support is everything.

ARECA has a nice admin utility. Browser based, so you log into the card with a browser and pull up all the different screens. Also means easy to remote log in. Full featured, as is ATTO.

Depending on what chassis you have you may be able to convert it to MiniSAS. Or you may be able to use it as a regular eSATA enclosure with a regular eSATA host card.

I seldom say anything negative about manufacturer products - for one thing, things may change, but usually it just ends up in battles that are no win for anyone. I will state that MyBooks are not on my list of products I would like to own. Seagate does the same thing though - you never know what kind of junk production drives get dumped into drive manufacturer enclosures. That and they buy a $3 bridge and give it the cheapest power supply they can find. Hard not to end up owning them when they sell for the price of a hard drive alone. But they can be a pox on us all.

Rick