I have a Dell XPS 8100 that I purchased about 8 years ago. I ordered it with RAID 1 (mirroring) and a 1.5TB system disk. The system (OS) drive is the RAID drive. About a year ago drives started to fail, which I expected. I would replace the failed drive (port 0 or 1) and log on as an administrator and run the GUI for IRST. It would say there is a blank disk and offer to rebuild the array. I would say yes and over the next 24 hours or so it would rebuild the array. Fine. But a about a year ago drives started failing pretty frequently. In the last few months they have been failing at a rate of about one a month. I was talking to my supervisor at work about this (we are IT guys) and he suggested maybe the drives are not really failing but the IRST controller is having a problem and is giving me false information. He suggested bringing one of the "failed" drives to work and testing it. Today I brought the most recently failed disk to work and plugged it into my Startech USB drive dock. I am able to access it with no problem. Since it is mirrored it behaves just as if it were the only drive, with the same structure as a single drive in a Windows 7 system. I can open and access my user folder and can open files.
I noticed that there is a driver update for the IRST on my system. I was reluctant to install this before as I was afraid if something went wrong I would lose the whole array but if I can access the drive I brought to work I suppose I have a backup of everything.
Does anyone have any thoughts or advice on this?
Thanks,
Don