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Two mornings have passed by now where I wake up and check my email only to find my Windows computer "discovering" my hardware RAID 1 drive. It pulls up the "Autoplay" options as if it was just plugged in. The strange part is my RAID 1 consists of two HDD's plugged into my motherboard over SATA. I have no clue what this means, but I can at least say that the two times this has happened was when I first interacted with the computer in the morning (About 4 days between occurrences). When this does happen, recent writes to my RAID are completely gone. I am losing data in a RAID 1....

Computer information:

  • My computer and hard drives do not go to sleep ever:

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  • Here is my RAID drive (F) shown in the Computer Management view:

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  • I am running a hardware RAID on my Gigabyte GA-990XA-UD3 motherboard

Any ideas on how I can diagnose this? I am fearing that one day my RAID 1 will explode and I will lose all my data. Any ideas on the problem? Any ideas on what will happen if this eventually gets worse? Is there a chance that I will lose all data if the RAID controller dies?

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    Unrelatyed to an answer, but are you sure it is hardware RAID? It looks like SB950 is software RAID. (Or to be more precise, fake RAID just like the Intel chipsets do. No real dedicated RAID hardware, only support in the firmware (UEFI or BIOS) and all the work done in drivers. This is relevant as to where to look for the problem. With HW RAID the RAID card should present only one drive. Problems should be handled by the RAID card. FOr software RAID it is handled by windows.
    – Hennes
    Commented Jan 21, 2017 at 16:02
  • Well I will just explain how I installed it. I thought it was a hardware RAID, but you may be right. I reinstalled Windows and at the beginning installed the RAID drivers that I downloaded from Gigabyte's website. I set up the array in a new BIOS utility that was accessible right after the bios boot up screen. Windows only ever sees one drive (my F drive). Is this considered hardware or software RAID?
    – Shadoninja
    Commented Jan 21, 2017 at 16:11
  • Also updated my post. I am running the mirroring RAID, not the striping RAID. Sorry for the confusion.
    – Shadoninja
    Commented Jan 21, 2017 at 16:18
  • Ugh. Loosing data to a mirror sounds more serious. Is there anything in the log files ([start] [run] eventvwr.msc) ?
    – Hennes
    Commented Jan 21, 2017 at 16:27
  • A little background about RAID. In the past CPUs were relative slow compared to disk IO. Creating a RAID array consumed significant CPU cycles, which where then not available for other tasks. One solution for this was a dedicated card with its own CPU (or custom ASIC) to do these calculations. This was mostly done for RAID 5 and similar. (RAID 0 and RAID 1 are trivial calculations). Back then you either used software RAID (the OS/driver did it for you) or hardware RAID (multiple drives connected to on plugin card, that card presented one [fake, larger] drive.
    – Hennes
    Commented Jan 21, 2017 at 16:32

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