RAID 1 with three members?

AUTO rebuild only works when you have FORMATTED drives to replace the dead ones.

The way you do that is to label which drive is 0 and 1 etc then remove all drives and replace them with blank drives.

Then press the raid menu keys to get the BIOS RAID MENU.

Then initialize the drives into RAID array.  Then remove the drives.

Then replace the bad drive with the new formatted drive and it will rebuild.

Raid WILL NOT AUTOMATICALLY INITIALIZE a new RAW hard drive and start rebuilding.

The reason you remove all drives and use new drives is because you can accidentally initialze the wrong drive and lose everything.

Thank you. Before I fitted these 1Tb drives, I experimented with some smaller drives. I installed the os, LINUX, and when all was up and running, I took one of the mirrored drives off line, rebooted and that was reported.

I wrote a new text file and saved it. Rebooted but added the other drive as I did it.

Without other action on my part, they rebuilt and reported all was well.

I added another 1Tb drive and was, and remain, confused by what the screen is telling me.

Did you look at the picture?

What is ID 0 Volume 0:1?

What is Member disk  (1)

There is a confusion for me in ports and ids

I really would appreciate an explanation f what we can see in that picture.

Regards

Chris

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@crb99 wrote:

 

There is a confusion for me in ports and ids

 

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And this is why mere-mortals should not be running a RAID on a desktop machine. :Smile:

I suggest you install a SSD instead and run a scheduled daily Imaged backup (IMO, better than a RAID-1).

So, you don't know either. That's not useful.

I really didn't expect the Dell community to be a waste of time! But there we are.

Looks like you have TWO RAID 1 arrays - one with a pair of discs  that's working properly, and the other has just one drive with the other missing, which is why it's showing degraded.

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@crb99 wrote:

1. So, you don't know either. That's not useful.

2. I really didn't expect the Dell community to be a waste of time! But there we are.

 

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1. Some problems are not easy to fix, or even possible in a forum thread. I suggest you download and read the Intel RAID docs.

2. Nice attitude. :Indifferent: I am helping you ... Image or Backup files (while you still can), install SSD, remove RAID, do daily backups.

Trying to admin a RAID-1 (for redundancy protection) and you don't even know how it works is not a good idea.

And yes, IIRC ... after you are in RAID Mode, all disks appear in RAID config. Pretty sure we use-to call those non-RAIDed Disks a "Single Disk RAID".

Finally, RAID-1 is not a backup, so I suggest you ask yourself why you are hassling with it.

The ISSUE you are having is based on not knowing the correct thing to do.

YOU CANNOT MIX RAID1 and NON RAID.

If you want to use 3 physical drives it must be RAID 5

There is no other option for using 3 drives.  If you add a 4th drive you can have dual Raid 1 setup.