Western Digital WD2003FYYS failed on computer having Raid 5 setup

[Run.DK]

I own a computer having Raid 5 setup and I have bought two Western Digital WD2003FYYS recently and both are appearing to be failed I don’t know what went wrong with them and what was the cause of the same as well, it appears to be dead by checking out the Raid Manager but then I am still not sure about the same as it has happened with two of them, is there anything I can do about the same???

[HankH]

I own a computer having Raid 5 setup and I have bought two Western Digital WD2003FYYS recently and both are appearing to be failed I don’t know what went wrong with them and what was the cause of the same as well, it appears to be dead by checking out the Raid Manager but then I am still not sure about the same as it has happened with two of them, is there anything I can do about the same???

In that case I just want to make a note of the information that you might have got in the raid manger or better take a snap of the same and post it here, so I can confirm if it is really dead or not, just post it for further help.

[Run.DK]

Here is a snapshot of the raid manger:

[HankH]

Yes it the raid manager is clearly saying that it has failed, I don’t think that there is any solution that you can try out rather than claiming a replacement for the same. Hope that helps.

[Baebi]

As far as other workaround is concerned you can check out the SMART status of the drives and see if you are able to find out of there is a bug in the fake raid that might be causing this issue??? There are possibilities of the same but then they are often unreliable, in order to check out the same boot an OS from other media, you can use Ubuntu desktop cd for it as well, I will like to inform you that Intel Matrix Raid are also known as raid integrated into motherboard which are fake hardware raid, so just check out the same and see if you are having the same case or not. For more information you can check out Wikipedia of raid and then refer to the “Firmware/driver-based RAID” part. Anyways just check it out and then let me know what you get.

[Run.DK]

Hey thanks for your interest I have tried out booting a live CD of ubuntu and I have found that the disks are shown up in the disk utility but then they are saying "SMART Status: Not Supported", I don’t have much knowledge about the same and I am really running out of ideas, is there anything else that I can try out to confirm if the driver has actually failed before going for an replacement??? Any further help for the same help will be highly appreciated.

[Donatien]

If you want then you can try out the following as well:
See if you are having another machine without raid then you can just install windows in another disk or if you want then you can try out creating a partition and then use disks from the raid as secondary one. You can just check them out one by one and see if the smart is showing any bad sector, if the drives are shown as healthy then I think that one of the drive might have failed in the array but then there are possibilities of recovering the information.

[Run.DK]

I will like to inform you that I have been running a self-test on ubuntu from tomorrow and have checked out the hard drive but then they both are currently showing as healthy and there are no bad sectors as well, anyways I just wanted to know if there is anyway by which I can recover the information as you have stated above????

[Donatien]

It seems as if the drives are ok, I think that the Intel fake raid software is messing up something, I think that you should try out re-building option in the bios setup screen and see if it is making any difference, if that does not help then you will have to try restoring from backup if you had it previously??? Just check out for the same and see which possible solution is making any difference.

[HankH]

I have checked out the BIOS as well as Intel Matrix Storage Manager for the rebuilding option but then I have not yet found the same, I have just found the below options:

Create Raid Volume
Delete Raid Volume
Reset Disks to Non-raid
Recovery Volume Options
Exit

I did not have any backup as raid was my backup plan, anyways what are my options now???