Breaking or Rebuilding a RAID 1 array

[Shayne]

I have 2 500GB WD drives.  I had an issue in windows today that said one of the drives was unreadable (nvidia control panel prompted me).  I saved all my work, closed my applications but during this time the computer totally locked up, no mouse control, no nothing.  So i had to do a hard reboot.  When it rebooted the nvidia controller said the RAID was degraded so I went through the steps of rebuilding.

I started the rebuild around 4:00pm and its now 8:30 and its not done, infact im not sure its doing anything as the utility doesnt have any sort of confirmation or progress meter so for all I know it could be crashed as well.  How long should it take roughly?

If perhaps one of these drives did die, how do i safetly break the array so that data on at least one of the drives is good?

[Tom]

is this a raid0? or a raid1? If its raid0, you can't rebuild. If its raid1, it may take a while, though shouldn't take as long as a raid5

If it is a raid1, just think, it has to copy all the data over from the good drive to the other, it can take a while (500GB is a lot).

[Shayne]

Subject   Its a RAID 1 array.

I know it should take a while and I anticipated that, but these are 2 3GB/s SATA2 drives.  Even at half speed thats only a few hours, its approaching 5 of them now.  I'm beginning to think its frozen however the light on the front of the case says that their is drive activity.

[Lazybones]

Are you sure you replaced the correct drive?

If you didn't replace the defective drive it is just going to hang as soon as it hits a fault, it might even mirror corrupt data to the good drive if it things the bad one is the primary.

Disconnect the power from one of the drives and attempt to boot.. should be an option to continue with one drive.  If it doesn't work, try with the other drive only connected.

If  it boots, get a replacement drive ASAP.

[Tom]

Hrm, Opps. I totally missed that :x

But drives don't hit anywhere near the speed of SATA300. Estimate it to go at about 60-80MB/s on average. The 500GB WD can burst up to almost 200MB/s but that's rare enough to not matter.

Of course at 50MB/s you only have a 3 hour wait..

I'm going to have to assume its a dead drive

[Shayne]

I took drastic measures and rebooted while it was "rebuilding", it booted to windows with no issues and both drives are registering as healthy.  i tried a few movies and music and pictures, etc that i got stored on the array and have noticed no problems.  I copied all the data off to a few other drives and will be doing some drive testing tomorrow.  No idea what drive is causing the issues but the issues dont seem to be there now.

[Lazybones]

I would download the manufactures drive tools and do a full scan on each disk. One of them might be flaking out.