I mentioned in a previous post here that I picked up some additional hard drives.  The 750 GB drive is running happily in an external eSATA-connected enclosure and is providing backup for my machine.  The other two drives are sitting on a shelf, and will remain there indefinitely.  There is a story behind their banishment from my computer.  It isn’t that there is anything particularly wrong with the drives themselves: I’ve finally concluded that my Asus motherboard has crappy RAID/AHCI support.

I have spent the last couple of days repeatedly building and tearing down my machine.  First I built a RAID 1 array.  Bear in mind that the drives I’m using are good quality Seagate 7200.10 drives: they have full SATA2 support, including Native Command Queuing (NCQ).  The drives they displaced were high-end WD Raptor 1500ADFD drives: arguably, the Raptors are better drives, but I had suspicions that WD drives might be behind my problems putting my system into standby mode in Vista.  I was wrong.

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I bought 1.75 terabytes of potential disk capacity today.   That storage comes in the form of three 3.5″ Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 model hard drives.  For a few moments I was holding all of that storage in one hand.

The first time I saw a terabyte of storage, it consisted of six 42U racks (about 6 feet tall) in a data centre.  In addition to being too large to hold in one hand (maybe in the back of a full-size pickup truck…), that storage weighed about a ton, and drew several kilowatts of of power.  That was less than 20 years ago- times sure do change. 

So, you might ask why I bought all this new disk capacity.  My thinking is as follows: firstly, I need a new drive to use for storing backups- that is the 750 GB drive, which I installed in a nice little Antec drive enclosure and connected via eSATA.  The other two 500 GB drives are to form a single 500 GB RAID 1 (redundant) drive array to replace my current 300 GB RAID 0 (non-redundant/performance) array. 

I’m doing this for two reasons.  Firstly, I want to have a more reliable/safe drive configuration for my primary computer.  Secondly, I am suspicious that my problems with putting Vista into standby mode relate to my RAID array.  I have particular suspicions about my Western Digital Raptor hard drives.  The Raptors are fantastic high performance drives.  However, I found a review of the model I have on a website some weeks ago (I can’t find it now of course…) that described drive corruption problems with Vista and standby. 

I will have an arguably “safer” RAID 1 array, if nothing else, once my drive format and restoration from backup are complete.  I suppose I may be trading some performance, although the Barracuda drives have higher data transfer rates than the Raptors.  More importantly for the “never say die” tech that I am, I’ll have eliminated at least one possible cause for the standby failures.  This last point is true whether the problem is corrected or not- either way, I’ll know whether the Raptor drives can be blamed.

…but you can’t fault my persistence.  I have managed to break my main PC again.  The exact same cause: once again, I decided to try putting my machine in standby after an update.  And once again, when the machine came out of standby, it horrendously corrupted my ATI SATA RAID array (of Western Digital Raptor drives).  Exactly the same steps, exactly the same results.

I have backups: somewhat out of date (by about 14 days), but backups none the less.  You might say “but Kelly, you knew this had failed in the past, why weren’t your backups current?”  Well, you see, my external hard drive where I keep my backups is full.  I figured: what is the chance that this could fail catastrophically again?  Of course, the obvious answer now is “100%”, but…well…okay, I’ll admit that was just a teensy bit dumb.

You might also say “But Kelly, doesn’t the old saying go ’stupidity is defined by those who repeat the same actions over and over in the hope of a different result’?”  No, no, I disagree.  I changed things: it was arguably the same action, but a different set of initial conditions.  I had installed the new Microsoft Vista performance and compatibility patches, which specifically said they corrected some problems with coming out of standby.  Oh, sure, they didn’t mention *my* problem of catastrophic drive corruption, but then no one ever does.  I’ve done dozens of hours of research on the Internet- I’ve found one or two people posting on the Asus motherboard forums who claim to have experienced the same problem (massive RAID array corruption after coming out of standby), but Asus is unresponsive to questions on the topic.  So I keep hoping that some change from ATI, Microsoft, or Asus will fix the underlying problem without them admitting (or possibly even knowing) that it exists, and I’ll be able to document that solution here.

So…here I am, restoring my system from backup.  Guess what happens part way through (”19 percent complete”) the process?  Yep, you guessed it- a power failure.  We haven’t had a power failure at our house in months.  I think the demon of technology is laughing at me…