In this video you will learn about issues associated with hard drives & RAID arrays.
Common Symptoms
Common symptoms associated with hard drives that can affect the overall performance of a hard drive are:
Read/write failures: Caused by dropping the magnetic drive, damaged cables (swap out cables), damaged SATA host adapter on the motherboard, overheated hard disk, & overheated CPU or chipset (remove dust/dirt, remove loose/failed heat sinks, remove old thermal grease).
Slow performance: Caused by reduced-performance configuration of 3Gbps or 6Gbps drives, using 3Gbps cables with 6Gbps drives & host adapters, SATA host adapters that have been configured for IDE (emulation) mode, and SATA host adapters that have been configured to run at reduced speeds
Loud clicking noises: Can be caused by repeated rereads of defective disk surfaces by the hard disk drive heads; make backups immediately & replace the disk. Humming noises can be caused by rapid head movement on a normally functioning hard disk.
Failure to boot: Boot sequence does not specify hard disk or lists system hard disk after drives with non-bootable media. CMOS settings have been corrupted & the system cannot find a bootable drive. The boot configuration data store used by Windows to control disk booting has been corrupted.
Drive not being recognized: Bus-powered USB hard disk is not recognized, USB or Thunderbolt drive is not recognized, & SATA hard disk or SSD drive is not recognized.
Operating system not being found: Non-bootable disk in the USB drive, boot sequence doesn’t list hard disk, incorrect installation of another operating system.
RAID Not Found:
RAID function disabled in system BIOS: Reconfigure SATA ports used for RAID as RAID & restart the system.
Power or data cables to RAID drives disconnected: Reconnect cables to RAID drive(s) & restart the system.
RAID Stops Working: Failure is caused by the failure of 1 or more disk drives in the RAID array.
RAID 0: Determine which drive has failed. Replace it & follow the vendor’s recommendations to recreate the array. Restore the latest backup. Any data that has not been backed up will be lost.
RAID 1, 10, & 5: Determine which drive has failed. Replace it. Follow the procedures provided by the RAID vendor to rebuild the array.
If both drives have failed in a RAID 0 or 1 array, the arrays must be rebuilt with new drives & the latest backup has to be restored. Any data that has not been back up will be lost.
If two or more drives have failed in a RAID 10 or 5 array, recovery options may vary according to the exact configuration of the array. For recovery options, see the RAID vendor’s documentation.
S.M.A.R.T. Errors: Self-Monitoring, Analysis, & Reporting Technology is a defect-warning feature supported by both SATA & PATA hard disks. When S.M.A.R.T. errors are displayed, back up the system immediately. To determine if the drive is actually bad or if the message was a false positive, download and run the disk testing software provided by your system or drive vendor. Typical items that are monitored are:
Drive temperature
Read retries
Slow spin-up
Too many bad sectors
S.M.A.R.T. Warnings:
Hard disk failure is imminent
A hard drive in your system reports that it may fail