Random drive failures with Intel® Rapid Storage Technology 9.6.0.1014 continue

[idata]

After having a great deal of problems with the random drive failures widely reported in the 8.9 RST release, and none after reverting back to v8.8, I was eager to try the new 9.6 series drivers after many apparently good reports of the random failures no longer being a problem.

However, I am now back with the stable 8.8 drivers; the 9.6 series have once again shown the same issues for me as did the 8.9 drivers - random drive failures, placing a disk in one of my 2 RAID-5 arrays missing or failed. Over 3 days of use of 9.6, I had 4 failures. Each time a drive started 'clicking' (for around 1 to 2 secs), making a sound similar to bearing failure or perhaps wayward seek attempts, then dropped from the array. Each time a rebuild would succeed without problems.

So far, after 24hrs running the 8.8 drivers again, no failures (nor do I expect any with a long history of success with 8.8).

. The 9.6 drivers rebuild and initialise arrays *fast*, compared to the 8.8 drivers. And the new interface is well thought out. But there *is* a problem with the drivers that remain from their 8.9 heritage I suspect...

Anyone else seen any problems yet?

My config:

Motherboard: ASUS P5B-Deluxe (ICH8R) supporting 6 SATA connections

CPU: Intel Q6600

Power Supply: 750W

OS: Windows 7, 64bit

RAID Config:

2xRAID-5 each with 3 1TB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM's, all ST31000528AS series.

Array 1 has CC35, CC34 and CC38 firmware on the drives,

Array 2 has all CC38 firmware.

Each array is divided into 2 logical volumes. The first on each is 75GB, the second 1788GB.

Stipe size is 64KB.

Write back caching is enabled on all logicals.

[idata]

Sorry to hear that you are having problems with the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology 9.6, actually there are very few problems or reports about this version and it seems to be working fine.

I will suggest you to update your motherboard BIOS to the latest version, run a diagnostics tool on the hard drives (usually provided by the hard drive manufacturer)

Check if you can update the firmware on all of your hard drives.

PV.

[idata]

All your suggestions already done Victor. But the key here is: I'm still running 8.8 right now - and not a hiccup. And there are /message/91489# 91489 other threads here indicating problems are surfacing with 9.6 too...

Hopefully someone will be able to isolate the problem before too many users begin reporting... the 8.9 problems were similarly slow to surface... but there was a problem. Pretty sure it's the same here.

Thx for the reply though. It's encouraging that you are monitoring things...

I'm curious - is there any core differences in the management algoithms employed between 8.8 and 8.8/9.6? Maybe too broad a set of changes to consider I guess - but timeouts, management of slower spin-up or general response times from the physical drives .... straw clutching here but there has to be something...

Victor_Intel wrote:

Sorry to hear that you are having problems with the Intel® Rapid Storage Technology 9.6, actually there are very few problems or reports about this version and it seems to be working fine.

I will suggest you to update your motherboard BIOS to the latest version, run a diagnostics tool on the hard drives (usually provided by the hard drive manufacturer)

Check if you can update the firmware on all of your hard drives.

PV.

[idata]

I too upgraded to 9.6, and was running fine for about a month with raid-5 w/64k stripe. I have 3 x 1.5TB 7200.11's.

1 week ago I changed the array to raid-0, and it was running ok for a while. But suddenly I had a disk go offline. I reverted to AHCI mode, and used several different SMART utilities, and Seagate's tools, and the hard drive passes. There are 18 bad sectors, but it passes with a long disk test. One of the other 7200.11's also has 18 bad sectors. ~100 is considered failing. And right now the bad sectors aren't increasing, they stabilized after the initial break-in.

Anyways, I tried re-enabling it for raid-0, and it immediately got spit out of the array. The Windows RST program was unable to put it back online. After a reboot, I was able to put it back into the array using the bios config.

So now I'm back to IRST 9.5.4.1001 which has worked fine for me for months. I am also back to a raid-5 array with 128K stripes. After doing many benchmarks, 128K was the best, with 150MB/s write average, and 250MB/s read average for this array.

FYI:

128k limited writes to 150MB/s

64k limited writes to 100MB/s

32k limited writes to 60MB/s

16k was too slow to benchmark using ATTO.

Using the write-back cache.

Read speeds were generally the same 200-250MB/s depending on i/o transfer size (1kb through 8MB).

So I am weary of IRST 9.6. Version 9.5.4.1001 has worked for me fine for months after Intel Matrix 8.9 also caused random drops.

Intel really needs to improve their driver quality.

Another bug I have is when using hard drive power saving, the drives will continuously spin up and down until I reboot.

[idata]

Hi there!

I bought an Acer Aspire 8943G, just recently, in Rotterdam, Netherlands. I've got Intel Rapid Storage Technology 9.5.6 installed. After less than a week of use (i purchased the laptop 6 days ago), i've seen an error message on the screen four times already. It says, one of my hard drives is faulty, i need an immediate backup, or i will lose data. Surprising, from a computer, which is less than a week old... I installed Hard Disk Sentinel, (an advanced hard disk diagnostic tool), ran a few tests, and it says, both of my hard disks are in immaculate condition, no surface problems, bad sectors, etc. What would be the problem, then? I don't know, which one to believe, but i think Hard Disk Sentinel should be right, as i see, other customers exprienced the same problem. Is it just a buggy software? Uninstall Intel Rapid Storage Techology could solve the problem?

[idata]

Surprising, from a computer, which is less than a week old...

IT CAN HAPPEN!

Just because its new does not mean you have to blame it on software you have to be sure its software causing this as software will cause problems within a limited time frame or a repeated thing you do, hardware problems can happen at any time.

If you use Intel Rapid Storage Technology 9.6 or the old Intel Matrix Storage Manager 8.8 and still have problems it is a hardware problem.

[idata]

Yes, i know, it can happen... I'm using computers for odd 20 years now. But, it still pisses me off, i paid 1500 euro (around 1300 pounds) for this laptop, i7 processor, Ati5850, etc., it should be perfect. And what's happening? I recieve error messages about my hard disk, the wireless adapter looses signal frequently, despite te 5.1 sound system, the actual sound is a joke, so, i expected something else. You know, what? I bought this computer to replace my 2.5 years old Packard Bell Easynote, which works like a charm still. I had more problems with this Acer in week, as i had with my Packard Bell in 2.5 years... And somebody still sholuld answer my question, how is it possible, that the Intel application says, my hard disk is faulty, and the Hard Disk Sentinel says, it is perfect. I'm going to install yet another diagnostic tool, let's see what it says.