So here's a friendly reminder to all - make sure you are backing up your computer if there is anything on it you care about!

My boot drive just failed with no warning whatsoever, no SMART errors, no slowdown, no nothing. But all of the sudden, it's gone. My wife said that she was in the middle of doing something and the system just stopped; and that was it.

I get home and go to boot it up and I see that my RAID has failed (0, 2xRaptor 150s), and there is a nice little clicking coming from one of the drives. Well, that's toast and I've already got my replacement RMA in the system so hopefully they will send it out on Monday.

But, none of that really bothers me, because I had backed that computer up 2 days ago to my Windows Home Server box. I'll rebuilt the RAID when the new drive gets here, and then I will reimage back to where I was. Thank God I back up periodically. Especially important if you are running a RAID-0. Both of these original Raptors have failed, I've already rebuilt the array from the first drive failing about 9 months ago....

just backed up before sp2, so i'll be good for a while.

I have a second hard drive in my computer that I regularly backup too. Plus occasionally backing up to the external. And sometimes on DVDs too depending on the info.

I finally gave up on using Raptors following one final failure too many. I don't care what anybody says - from my experience, there is something wrong with the Raptor, either in QC or design, that Western Digital needs to address but isn't. At the end, I even tried active cooling but it didn't make a difference - they still failed. I sold my set of drives on receipt of my last RMA and used the proceeds to pick up an SCSI U320 controller on eBay, a 15k U320 drive from Newegg, and haven't looked back.

In my mind, the Raptor's only saving grace is that WD seems to be very good about RMAing failed drives. Which was surprising after my prior frustrations with them in trying to get drives replaced under warranty.

Agree 100%

BTW, I just need to ask....is anyone concerned about what happens to a hard drive when you RMA it for a replacement? I mean, it holds all your data and most likely personal data. Does the manufacturer repair, wipe and send it to the next RMA requestor? If so, how secure is the wipe? If it's not repaired what happens to it? Too many questions without known answers for me.

Hard drives are relatively cheap these days (I'm not talking about 15000RPM SCSI drives though). I'd rather destroy the drive myself and buy a new one.

It bothers me, too. I went through the ID theft mess once several years ago, and will do everything in my power to ensure I don't have to suffer that nightmare again.

The only reason I was even RMAing my Raptors was (besides the expense) that each failed drive was only half of a Raid 0 array at the time of failure (meaning any any recoverable data would be fragmentary at best). I've decided that all future machines I build for myself using SATA drives are going to include a RAID 0 array for this reason -- I'll just have to get accustomed to backing up. Any single external drives that I use for backups will be encrypted and probably recycled via sledgehammer instead of RMA.

In the end, I guess I really need to build a home server. I really don't have an excuse not to (other than sheer laziness), especially now that MHS is available to me via my MS Technet account.

Definitely a concern of mine as well. But also unconcerned for the same reason as steltek. I don't figure it will be possible for anyone to put my array back together without the other drive.

steltek, clearly this is anecdotal, but I agree with you. I've had 100% of the Raptors I've bought fail. Granted it's just the two, but I have 8 year old IDE drives still running fine and these can't even make 5 years.

The RMA process has not been a problem for me, thankfully.

Totally love my Windows Home Server!

I've used it to reimage laptops before I sell them - when I buy one, I immediately install the WHS connector software and do a full backup. Tell WHS to save that forever, and then use the laptop. When I'm ready to sell it, I just securely wipe the HD, boot off the WHS recovery cd, and reimage from the server. Fast and easy.

Yeah, I do that as well, but not for that purpose. Usually when I receive a PC from Dell, I reinstall the OS so there is not so much crap on it. Just in case I bork it or need to return it, I can reinstall.

yep, I do that too. My current machine (the studio xps 13 aka m1340) didn't come too bad though. Just a few things to remove, so I went with that method so I didn't risk messing up some of the laptop stuff.

Yeah, it always seems like I am missing a driver when I do that. It works, but there's always something that's quirky.... I think Dell creates its own chipset driver even when it's using something standard like the ICH10 chipset.

Well, it's not all bad I guess. They are sending me a VelociRaptor as a replacement.

I might need to kill my other raptor so that I get a matched set of VelociRaptors.....

And all this time I thought a Velociraptor was a dinosaur!
men and their toys....

Thanks for the reminder. I used my FreeAgent To Go last night and backed up my dinosaur of a computer. We are going on 10 years with this Optiplex!

I must admit, this drive is at least as fast as my old one. My RAID-0 is smoking.

I think I might have jinxed myself. Intel Matrix manager is reporting that my other Raptor is starting to fail. I'm guessing that it can read the SMART info from the drive, because I cannot through the OS since it's in the RAID 0. WD Diagnostics cannot read it either.

I've bluescreened a couple of times since it started reporting the error, and I've changed that PC to backup daily on my WHS system. I've got an RMA already set up with Western Digital, but if it's anything like last time, it's going to take 3 weeks for them to even ship it.

So I guess I get a set of matched VelociRaptors after all...

My opinion of the Raptor line of drives is very low right now. And the Raptors I bought originally were the ones meant for servers, not the consumer line, in hopes that the higher MTBF would benefit me and the RAID that they were going into. I will say that the 5 year warranty has paid for itself MANY times over for me, as I am now replacing the first replacement! Without my WHS box... I can't even imagine how pissed I would be with losing info time after time. I'd probably have moved to a RAID 1 or 1+0.

The MTBF of the drive isn't really the issue, and the drive actually might not be failing.

The problem is that we are all using hard drives with firmware designed to be used as single drives on RAID controllers. The firmware on a desktop drive spends at times up to 2-3 minutes trying to recover from a perceived error, while RAID controllers only allow on average 7-15 seconds on average for the same recovery before throwing an error.

While you are waiting on your RMA, do some research on the issue of "TLER" (Time Limited Error Recovery) and WD's Raptor drives. WD ships all the new Raptors (as well as all of their non-RAID edition drives) with TLER disabled. It is enabled by default on all of the RAID edition drives (which, are of course, more expensive drives).

Activating TLER on your drive array might solve some of your failure problems - there is a utility floating around out there called WDTLER that can enable it.

It is pretty hard to find, but I recently came across a copy. I'm willing to provide it to anyone who wants it, but be aware of three things: 1) I haven't tried it out yet, 2) I didn't get it from a source that I trust (it was a from a general download, though it scans clean), and 3) I've read that it has issues when used on drives larger that 1TB. The utility must be run from a bootable floppy or CD in DOS.

Also, be aware that TLER works by telling the drive to abbreviate the recovery process and mark the sector as bad if it can't be fixed quickly (sort of making it the lesser of two evils on a RAID array).

I'll look into the steltek, but I am fairly certain when I purchased the drives I chose the enterprise version which was meant for RAID. Now, since this drive was a replacement from the original one I purchased, I cannot say for sure if it was still that edition or not.

Either way, I should be getting the replacement free of charge so not too bad other than the headache of reinstalling.

Didn't even consider that you might have purchased an enterprise version -- I never did, and most of the systems I've worked on for folks with failed RAID arrays didn't do it either.

At least your WHS will make reinstalling much simpler.

I'm about to RAID my system up again pretty soon - trying to decide at this point if I want to go back to SATA drives or invest in a SCSI setup (those PCIe SCSI RAID cards are pretty expensive, though, so I'm still considering if I can fit it in the budget).

Yeah, the price difference at Newegg when I bought them was only around $10 per drive so it seemed like the right thing to do. I think the warranty was 5 instead of 3 years as well. Tough to remember that far back.

A SCSI raid is ridiculously expensive! Have you considered an SSD boot drive with a regular (or RAID I guess) data/backup drive? The throughput on some of the recent SSDs are amazing. Check out the latest on Anandtech with the Intel SSD.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3667
The newest SSDs are nearly saturating the 3Gbps SATA channel for read speeds....

Yeah, I've thought seriously about it - that is a pretty good article you have linked. However, in the end, I just don't know how much I trust the longevity of any SSD yet (plus, there is also the fact that a higher capacity high-performance SSD costs about as much as an OEM SCSI drive having twice the storage capacity and none of the longevity issues).

I recently found a company with a few new OEM 400GB 10k Cheetah NS SAS drives and 300GB 15k SAS Hitachis for about $285 each. If I can find a decent compatible SAS RAID controller, I might decide to give it a try with one or the other (even if I have to buy one drive now and one later). If I get it up and running, I'll eventually convert that old Dell 400SC that is laying in my closet into a WHS to handle my backups via gigabit ethernet.

Man, my WHS is running off a 1.8 Celeron (400SC also) off the original mobo - IDE only. You don't need fancy SAS to get up and running! Sure, it's not speedy, but it gets the job done at a low cost.