Help with degraded RAID and HD failures

[sandsteinr]

I recently bought a new PC with Vista 64 and a RAID 1 setup with two Hitachi SATA 1TB drives. A few weeks ago, I got a "RAID Degraded" warning from Intel's Matrix Storage Manager. It said the drive in Port 3 had failed. I bought a new drive, a Seagate Barracuda 1TB, and replaced it in Port 3. The RAID rebuilt fine, and everything worked well -- until today. Now, the new Seagate drive has failed! I've never had two drives fail on me in quick succession, so I plugged the Seagate into a SATA-to-USB cable to test it. It seems to read just fine that way. Out of curiosity, I plugged the Hitachi that had failed into the cable, and it works too. If I plug them into the PC case, the OS doesn't recognize them as being there, and Storage Manager still lists them as failed.

 

Can someone help me figure out what's going on? Is Mr. Murphy just giving me some extra love here? If I buy a third drive, is it likely to fail too? Is there a way to coax the failed drives to work again in the PC, like a reformat? Is this a quirk of RAIDs, that they eat drives on occasion? I've never had a computer with a RAID before, and I'm only barely familiar with the terminology. I'm reluctant to spend cash on yet another drive, especially when the dead ones still work via USB cable. Since the computer is new, I assume the other hardware isn't (likely) causing the problem, and I've had Norton Internet Security running from day one, so I doubt it's a virus. Help, please?

 

*crickets*

 

ETA: Chkdsk would run on the original Hitachi drive, with the result of misallocated free space in the MFT. A six hour reformat later, and I managed to get it working and rebuild the RAID. Hurray, I can play Oblivion again! Until the next time the RAID fails. I still don't know what happened. The brand new Seagate drive hangs in chkdsk, and it won't format. Hopefully I can get a refund for it.

 

 

Thanks,

Sandy