Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
July 18th, 2010, 1:49
I have two Areca RAID cards, an ARC-1120 and an ARC-1261 (very unfortunate that I didn't have more foresight and get a ARC-1280ML to begin with, as this combination very much limits my choices of motherboards, but oh well). I love how the ARC-1261 gives me the full bandwidth of all drives put together; I've been able to achieve as much as 800 MB/s sequential, and this does translate into real-life performance for many of the things I do with the RAID volumes.
The one thing I am very displeased with, regarding these Areca cards, is that when an unrecoverable Read Error happens, the LBA of that sector is not reported or logged anywhere. If this happens during a RAID 5 rebuild, then the sector in the RAID volume ends up getting zeroed. I really wish the RAID controller would report the LBA of every Read Error, so I could at the very least know what file has been corrupted — and at best, attempt data recovery of the sector(s) in question.
Is there something I've missed? Is there in fact a way to get Areca cards to report the LBA of error events?
And if not, which hardware RAID controllers do report the LBA of error events? For example, do 3ware cards do this?