RAID 0 to 5 migration frozen with NVidia's Control Panel
Hi all, after a bit of a scare, I decided to add another drive to my two 1TBs to shift from RAID 0 to RAID 5. I wasn't sure how to go about this process up until I put the extra drive in and to my surprise, the Control Panel gave me a simple option to migrate from 0 to 5. As soon as I saw that, I started it, but quite stupidly not knowing what the process was, nor how long it would take.
It started fine and working, but incredibly slowly (from my point of view, anyway), and looking like it would take 24 hours to complete the migration. Unfortunately, within that 24 hours, I had to use that machine for some video editing. I'd have preferred not to, but I really didn't have an option. Anyway, things went a bit array and a poor piece of software went bad and brought the machine down with a bluescreen.
Since the machine's come back online, the migration has just sat at 34%, without moving. All the drives seem perfectly healthy and all my data is in tact and there, but the migration is just stuck, not moving.
I've already done a good bit of shifting huge amounts of data all over the place and at this moment in time, I don't have another 2TB of space elsewhere to backup, wipe and start again, never mind the time that sort of solution takes. If that is my only option, then yeah, I'll find a way to do it, but if possible, I'd really, really like to avoid doing that.
Anyway, my details are Win7 64bit Pro, an ASUS Striker II Formula mobo, with the latest BIOS firmware and NVidia drivers and 3 Seagate Barracuda 1TB drives. The NVidia BIOS RAID program is what I used to create the setup originally, but then I used their Windows program to (attempt to) migrate from RAID0 to RAID5.
I'm quite stuck here as I think the stuck migration is affecting my system performance too and I really don't like things like this just hanging around / nagging my system
It started fine and working, but incredibly slowly (from my point of view, anyway), and looking like it would take 24 hours to complete the migration. Unfortunately, within that 24 hours, I had to use that machine for some video editing. I'd have preferred not to, but I really didn't have an option. Anyway, things went a bit array and a poor piece of software went bad and brought the machine down with a bluescreen.
Since the machine's come back online, the migration has just sat at 34%, without moving. All the drives seem perfectly healthy and all my data is in tact and there, but the migration is just stuck, not moving.
I've already done a good bit of shifting huge amounts of data all over the place and at this moment in time, I don't have another 2TB of space elsewhere to backup, wipe and start again, never mind the time that sort of solution takes. If that is my only option, then yeah, I'll find a way to do it, but if possible, I'd really, really like to avoid doing that.
Anyway, my details are Win7 64bit Pro, an ASUS Striker II Formula mobo, with the latest BIOS firmware and NVidia drivers and 3 Seagate Barracuda 1TB drives. The NVidia BIOS RAID program is what I used to create the setup originally, but then I used their Windows program to (attempt to) migrate from RAID0 to RAID5.
I'm quite stuck here as I think the stuck migration is affecting my system performance too and I really don't like things like this just hanging around / nagging my system
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Comments
First off I have no idea why you would have even done this...
With 3 drives I see no gain in a Raid 5 layout. (Raid 0 is great, the 0 stands for chance of data recovery (0%) and the 5 adds extra write cycles to the mix.)
If the data is unimportant then raid 0 is fine.
Why you Should Not us Raid 5:
http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt
You might have hit a possible MBR 2TB limit hit... Anything over 2TB has to be GPT.
I personally would not trust this botched migration, get the data off the array, break it then start again putting your data back. I also would not use a "Motherboard Raid" on anything where data was important.
Sorry I haven't been the bearer of any good news, but I've seen too many $5 Motherboard Raid chips barf an array and become a data recovery nightmare.
First of all, you are going to take on a significant performance hit from RAID 5.
Second of all, I too have seen motherboard RAID setups shit the bed on multiple occasions—far too many times for my liking. I would never trust any data to an onboard RAID chip. I don't even know why motherboard vendors bother including the option.
The only way I'd do RAID is with a caching hardware controller; a card with its own CPU, memory, and battery. You're looking at around $300 for a base card. For example: <a href="http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-3467298-10440897?url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116052&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-Hard+Drive+Controllers+/+RAID+Cards-_-3ware-_-16116052&cjsku=N82E16816116052" target="_top">
3ware 9550SXU</a><img src="http://www.tqlkg.com/image-3467298-10440897" width="1" height="1" border="0"/> and then another $115 for the <a href="http://www.anrdoezrs.net/click-3467298-10440897?url=http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816116087&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-Server+-+Accessories-_-3ware-_-16116087&cjsku=N82E16816116087" target="_top">Battery Backup Unit</a><img src="http://www.ftjcfx.com/image-3467298-10440897" width="1" height="1" border="0"/>.
That's the only way to do RAID right. Anything else, you're just asking for nightmares.
Going RAID5 is not a BAD idea necessarily, especially if you don't want complete data loss from a single hard drive failure (though with software RAID you're much better off going with RAID 10, or 1+0 depending on how NVIDIA labels it). The migration from RAID0 to 5 is going to take a LONG TIME, no way around that. You'd be best to leave your computer completely alone while it is going on. Technically speaking, the BSOD shouldn't affect the RAID migration, it should be able to pick up where it left off. I would suggest leaving it alone for a few hours, if it still hasn't progressed at all, see if you can stop the migration and then restart it. If not, you might be SOL and have to back up your data and rebuild.
Of course that all said, as everyone else mentioned you're going to take a performance hit running software RAID 5. If you have a powerful enough system, you probably won't notice it (except when you're writing a lot of data to the disks, such as when you're installing software). If I were you, I'd just drop the cash to get a 4th disk and go RAID 10. That's what I'm running right now on my home desktop and it's a hell of a lot nicer than my old software RAID 5 array was.
Also, RAID 0 is not great unless you hate your data and want to watch it be destroyed. Seriously, RAID 0 isn't even RAID because it lacks Redundancy. RAID 0 is just AID.