Hello,
I am not very technical so I hope someone who is can help me.
I have a RAID1 drive on my Dell PC. Last year, on 2 occasions (a few months apart) my computer crashed and when I rebooted I received the message "A raid volume is degraded because of failed hard drives". I had the failed drive replaced each time. A few months later I had the same problem. While troubleshooting, my technician removed the bad drive and tried to reboot it using another computer (not sure why). He discovered that the drive booted just fine and he put it back into my PC and rebuilt the RAID. At the time he said there was probably something with the software that was causing these problems, but could not tell me more. Everything was fine for a while until the same thing happened again about a month ago. His solution was to disable the RAID and just do frequent backups, but I'm a bit stubborn and would like to understand why this is happening. He does not seem to know much about RAID drives, nor does another PC expert I talked to (I live in a pretty small town). This is my home office PC and I like the security of the backup drive. I am currently working with one drive - the other still shows a status of "failed" in the Intel Matrix Storage Console and shows "Error Occurred" on the boot screen.
I am almost sure that each time the problem has occurred my PC was unattended. So I thought maybe there were some tasks running in the background that were causing the problem. The only thing I could see was that Norton 360 was set up to do a disk optimization automatically when I was not using the computer, which I disabled a few weeks ago. Since then I have had no problems. My first question is what could be causing the drives to fail? And once that is resolved, I would need to get the failed drive working again, assuming it's not really bad.
Here is some system information:
Dell Studio XPS 435T 64BIT
Processor: Intel Core i7-920 processor (8MB L3 Cache 2.66GHz)
Memory: 8GB 1066 MHz DDR3 4DIMM
Hard drive: 1.2TB 7200RPM SERIAL RAID1
Thanks in advance to anyone who may have some ideas!