28th July 2008

Silicon Image SATARAID5 and Reboots

posted in Technology, Vista, Storage |

So I have a nice new storage array going for my home using the Sans Digital ESATA case, 4 WD Greenpower drives, and the Silicon Image ESATA card that came with the Sans Digital enclosure. The card comes with software called SATARAID5 that appears to mostly work just fine- it was easy to setup a RAID5 array with my 4 disks, and while I can’t dynamically add more disks too it (it looks like there is some other newer software that supports that kind of thing), overall it works well with one major exception. Before I mention that I should add that I’m just looking for some good reliable mass storage. This isn’t a “backup”, it doesn’t need the highest performance storage possible (although faster is always better), and all that. I’ve tested yanking a hard drive out of the array in mid-file copy and putting it back in later and it rebuilds (takes about 24 hours) but is fine.

The big catch is that everytime I reboot my system it does a rebuild- the management app has a nice UI that says that “Group 0 Volume A was not shutdown properly”, and it kicks off the rebuild which takes a very long time. So far those rebuilds have worked great but its really annoying to have degraded performance and reliability after every reboot.

Anyone have any experience with this stuff or ideas? Is there some way to manually shutdown the volume before I reboot? Some bug fix version that fixes this issue (I’m running SATARAID5 version 1.5.2.1 on Vista 32-bit).

This entry was posted on Monday, July 28th, 2008 at 12:47 am and is filed under Technology, Vista, Storage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are currently 3 responses to “Silicon Image SATARAID5 and Reboots”

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  1. 1 On August 12th, 2008, Jason said:

    Are you still experiencing the issue noted in your post? I’m considering picking up the same model, and am curious to see if you’ve found a workaround. It looks like a solid enclosure overall.

  2. 2 On August 15th, 2008, Alex said:

    So far I am still experiencing the same problem although rebuilds appear faster with the newest driver update. The enclosure seems great and the eSATA controller hardware also seems fine, but the RAID5 software thing just has this stupid issue.

  3. 3 On August 31st, 2008, Aaron said:

    Hey guys, having the same problem here as well. Good to see I’m not alone. The biggest thing I’m concerned is that I have this mass storage device acting as my archive for my Media Center and I have the thing on a bi-weekly reboot for refresh performance. The concern is that should I have a drive go down and a reboot occurs before I can replace and rebuild the drive, what happens? As I’m sure you guys know, a RAID 5 problem beyond one drive is pretty much critical causing total data loss.

    Anyway, that’s just my thoughts, I hope someone finds a solution or that Silicon Image is paying attention to this. Should this result in data loss, I’ll seriously consider boycotting all SI products in the future. A RAID 5 system, even external, should not be suffering from a rebuild issue everytime a normal shutdown or reboot is triggered in the OS. How else is one supposed to disconnect and shutdown or reboot properly if not from the normal proceedures?

    Good luck to everyone else having this trouble.

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