Enables the selection of an Improper Shutdown Policy (including Check-Pointing and Dirty Parity handling) in the Create RAID Group dialog box when the selected RAID Group type is a fault-tolerant configuration (Mirrored, Mirrored/Striped and Parity RAID). This feature is not supported for Legacy RAID groups.

I do not have the Check Pointing option?

I am building a new RAID array and the check point option is nowhere to be seen? It was there before, so I can only assume the latest drivers or software (which I am using) has removed this?

Does this mean it is disabled by default?

I do not really want to wait for a few days to see if this works…

I stumbled on this site after having this issue for the fist time. I have been trying to copy about 5Tb of data back to the new RAID5 volume from various smaller drives on my system. After a break in copying (all data copied from one of the disks) I let the system reboot as Windows Update was bugging me.

Following this reboot, the RAID array wanted to rebuild again - not what I needed after several days of rebuilding and copying of data! The RAID array is slow enough without trying to copy data during a rebuild!

I decided to start again disable check-pointing as per the fix above and hopefully this will resolve the issue.

In direct response to TTP above, I found that if I remove all drives (except 1) I can delete the broken RAID group without needing to wait for the rebuild to finish. I then added one drive at a time and deleted each time. When all drives were re-added and raid group deleted I could then re-create the RAID5 group! That saved me a few days!

Please note ensure you don’t want any of the data on the drive! In other words back it up!

Disable your on-board SATA if it’s BIOS prevents you from seeing the card BIOS (which mine does, not usually an issue as I can use the SATARAID5 tool).
Create a RAID0 (not 5!) array, reboot, turn the on-board SATA back on.
Reboot, then go into windows, ensure you delete the old array in the SATARAID5 tool, convert the BIOS made one (right click on it).
Use the drive (Quick format, etc) to ensure the old one is gone for good, then delete the RAID0 and reboot again and…. it’s gone! FINALLY! YAY!

This was actually the only way I could even remake the drive setup correctly (turn off checkpoint). This may have been due it originally being made on another system but unconfirmed…

Also note this occured in thanks to windows “repairing” the drive after rebooting after spending 68 hours of array creation… Windows 7 decided it should repair the drive for me, isn’t it great?

Now to wait yet another 48 hours of array creation… I also trialed the rebooting to ensure it doesn’t do the RR, thanks a lot to all who added comments and assistance above!

What is even more weird is that if the array is empty, then win7 will boot immediately. Once you start putting data on the array the loading screen will start freezing and the delays will start.

None of the proposed solutions on this thread seem to fixes my issue, not even just putting the drives as pass-thru and using windows handle the raid fixes it.

Luckily I still have a copy of Winxp and I’m going to put that back on….sometimes newer isn’t better…

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=902853

This correction is specifically for RAID Controllers using any of the Silicon Image RAID drivers. This hot fix is also included in the Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3). You should also be sure that your controller is using the most up-to-date driver from Silicon Image.

(Note: minor correction included in this post; please delete previous post and this line)

I thought this was something silly, but out of desperation/frustration I tried it. By simply starting Windows Media Player I reduced my rebuild time from 65 hours to 12 hours. No idea why. Thanks KBeee

my compliments to Alex for the site and to everyone for suggestions/contributions.

I have a Edgestore DAS801t wich bundles a card with Silicon Image Si 3132 controller/port multiplier (8 disks with two SATA channel).

I filled the unit with eight Seagate Barracuda 1.5 TB and created one RAID 5 with five disks and RAID 0 with the remaining 3.

I copied all my files on the RAID 5 and the system worked fine for some months even if I wasn’t very happy with the rebuilding at each boot.

Now after a 220 V AC line failure, the RAID 5 presented an orphan drive and the others are recognized as part of RAID 5 but are all offline (pink-red colour in the block diagram).

No way to bring them back online or rebuild the group (the relevant commands in the SATARAID utility are grayed).

Checked all the connections and drive insertions in the bays, everything seems to be ok.

After googleing it seems that many people experienced the same, but neither found a fix along with the description of the problem, nor had a feedback on it.

Has someone some fix or suggestion ? Edgestore support ? Silicon Image support ?

Please help !

Thanks and best regards,

Andrea (Lake Como - Italy)

BTW, the Silicon Image software RAID5 works quite well in-spite being poor man’s RAID (I am a poor man anyway…) I get about 60 to 100 MB/s read with 4 drives (depending on chunk size, 8KB ~60MB/s - 128KB ~100MB/s …), and about half that much for write. BUT, the write speed depends on CPU speed and amount of RAM and it is not always that good. Because the CPU does the XOR, write speed is very limited by the PCI bus IO speed of 133MB/s. Also, with 3 hard drives you have to write ~1.5 times the data (two chunks data and one parity). Of course do not benchmark it too soon, it takes 30+ hours to build RAID5 with four 1TB drives.