Last night I spent about three hours working on my PC. The replacement drive from Western Digital finally arrived, but I’m definitely not happy about two things:

1. The replacement drive is a “refurbished” drive and I expected WD to send a new one
2. The drive was reported as “failed” and the RAID volume was degraded after about an hour of use

Why the heck did WD send me a refurbished drive, which is older than my dead drive and has a really old firmware, I don’t know. Worst of all, if this refurbished drive is dead, I’m pretty much screwed, because the warranty on the refurbished drive expires much earlier. So much for the five year warranty…

After I created the RAID volume, partitioned the drive and installed 64 bit Windows Vista, I started having some strange performance issues. The system would freeze every once in a while and the hard drive light would stay on for 5-10 seconds, preventing me from being able to work on the PC. The mouse cursor would move, but everything else was not responding. I have never experienced such a weird “lag” before and I knew something was wrong. After installing SP1 and SP2 on Vista, I downloaded the Intel Matrix Storage driver and it immediately reported that the new drive was bad. I think the lag was happening because of a bad RAID controller driver, but I’m not 100% sure. I then deleted the RAID volume and recreated it, repartitioned the drive and reinstalled Windows again. This time, I installed the RAID drivers along with the chipset drivers first and things were working much smoother. I did not get any reports on drive failure and everything seems normal. I will do some heavy file writing later today and see if the new drive fails. I hope it does so that I could call WD and have them send me a new drive instead…god knows how these refurbished drives perform.

Obviously this time, I reconfigured RAID for RAID 1 (mirroring). Although I lost half of the space, I’m just not comfortable losing any kind of data anymore. And the downtime I had with my PC is also unacceptable. With RAID 1, if one of the drives fail, I can continue to work on the PC and replace the drive whenenever I get a replacement. The system will automatically copy everything into the new drive for redundancy, once a new drive is connected. I’m also planning to schedule routine backups and have a mirrorred external volume for my photography needs.

I’m in John Wayne airport (South California), waiting for my flight to Denver. There is no free Internet here, so I tethered my Blackberry via Bluetooth, set up a network connection and it works great! The speed is about 15-20 Kb/s, but what a heck, better than nothing :)

Hopefully my replacement hard drive from WD is at home by now. This time, I’m putting the hard drives in RAID0 (mirroring) configuration, even though I’m not planning to store anything on them. For my photo storage purposes, I’m thinking about getting either two external drives, or something like the “WD My Book Mirror Edition 2TB“. And even then, I’ll probably backup my photos at least once a month…

I had two WD 150GB Raptor drives configured in RAID0 on my main PC. Knowing it is risky, I used to back up my photos at least once a week. After a couple of trips and busy schedule, I was getting lazy and simply forgot to back up the PC. Last week one of the drives failed (physical drive failure) and I lost all of my fox pictures! I was so disappointed, because I had over 500 photos of fox kits and I only have about 10 pics that I exported out of Lightroom in 1600px resolution :( If only I had saved them on my external backup drive, I wouldn’t have lost anything.

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking, bad lesson learned! Going forward, I will be copying files from the cards into two locations. Remember to back up your data more often!