Hello, everyone. This is the first time I've ever posted here, but I've been using the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (passively, of course) for about four years. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to really afford an upgrade to my computer system until now, so some of this may be outdated (I'm not sure, I couldn't even find a support forum for IRST here). A friend actually helped me put this into place in order to provide some redundancy to my family photos and videos after I experienced a horrible data loss debacle with one of Netgear's "Stora" storage solutions. What he did was used one of my older 1 TB hard drives, and we purchased two more of the same size. Raid 5 seemed the best option, because if one drive had issues it would be rebuilt - and it if failed completely, I could insert a new drive really quick to get the data copied over to a new drive. The problem is that , nearly every day, I get a "volume degraded" error and IRST starts a rebuild after a drive fails. While I do have backups on DVD, I am very scared of losing this data as it contains a treasure trove of images of people that I love dearly and will never see again (they are deceased).
What I would like to do is ask the community if you can do the following:
- Assist me in determining which drive is failing (the "Activate port LED" on each port doesn't seem to work?).
- Assist me in the best way to upgrade each drive without losing the data that is already on the array.
- Currently, the total space on the Raid 5 volume is 1.8 TB, with only 13% of the disk being free.
- I would like to upgrade the array so that each disk has a total capacity of 2 TB, which with 3 disks should give the entire volume a size of 4 TB (before being reduced by cache sizes, etc).
I've taken screenshots and uploaded them to an album on Imgur (a photo-sharing site). The link is here: Intel Rapid Storage Technology Raid 5 Array - Album on Imgur
Thanks, everyone.