Firewire RAID

[theviceofreason]

I am having a problem with my Formac 500 Oxygen FW400 external drive. It's a 500gb drive made up of two 250gb disks striped as a RAID 0 volume and has worked for about six weeks with no problems.

I do not have it on all the time and when I powered it up today I got a message saying it could not be read by this computer and giving me the option of initialise, eject or ignore.

I chose ignore and then opened disk utility, which lists it as two 232.9gb drives, one of which is a 'slice' of the RAID, another of which has no logical drive on it. It also lists the 465.5gb raid, which has only the first slice showing under it, marked as 'offline'.

Is there anything I can do to get this working again?

Thanks,
Andy

 

[artov]

Disk utility supports software RAID. You might be adable to make the
disks as a RAID 0 stripe.

BTW. This shows what is the problem with RAID 0: one disk has a problem and
the whole set has a problem. With RAID 1, 3, 5 and 10 if one disk has a problem,
it could be replaced (on your case I guess it is not necessary) and its content
could be fetched from rest of the set.

 

[chemistry_geek]

I have a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 320 GB, it WAS a stripped RAID array, and one drive failed, very badly. LaCie could not repair the hard drive, apparently, a component on the circuit board of the HD failed, actually burned-out due to high heat issues (inadequate ventilation in LaCie's design). The only way to get the information was to send the drive to either DriveSavers.com or Ontrack.com for data recovery. Since I was in the final stages of writing my masters thesis and it was on the drive, I had to get the data recovered. DriveSavers.com quoted $3,500 (three-thousand, five hundred) for data recovery, while OnTrack.com quoted $2,500 for data recovery. The reason for the high cost is that the entire drive was a striped RAID array, if it was a single hard drive, then the cost would be around $400, but the professionals have to take two hard drives into a clean room, remove the platters, and read both drives, and reconstruct the data. OnTrack then sends you via email the directory structure of your failed RAID array, you can even see actual documents (Word documents, Excell, JPEGs, etc...) from its servers, but you cant save anything. If what you need is visible, then you can give the go-ahead to either write your data to DVD or to put it on another high capacity hard drive, in my case, they put it on a LaCie Big Disk Extreme 500 GB striped RAID array, and they didn't forget to bill me for that shiny new drive either!!! In all I spent $3,100 to get my entire life back. My advice to you, don't use a striped RAID array unless YOU ABSOLUTLEY NEED ONE, and buy smaller daisy-chained FireWire drives if you need more space, or take the time to burn to high-quality DVD or CD media.

I don't trust my new LaCie 500 GB Big Disk Extreme; it's only on when I read/write to it, then it gets un-plugged from the electrical outlet and the computer, don't want any voltage spikes/static discharges going to this new unreliable drive.

I gave the rebuilt LaCie enclosure to one of my buddies, he dropped in two new equal capacity higher-quality drives and has not had any problems with my old LaCie enclosure (with all brand new components - except for my old hard drives). The newer hard drives he dropped in the enclosure even run much cooler than the OEM hard drives LaCie uses, he even leaves the drives spinning for days - no heating issues. You probably could put together a RAID array yourself, if you know what you're doing.

Best of luck!