Hi there,

I hope someone has a similar setup to mine, I have a cheap 50$cad pci softraid card with 2 250GB hard drives in a raid 0 stripset.
the drives are Maxtor 250Gb with 16mb cache and a WD 250Gb with 8mb cache. the maxtor is using dma 6 and the WD is dma 5

Now i notice not only the drives get hot as hell but when they are under load, the seem to lag. Best example is with limewire. If you're running limewire with fast speeds and you're trying to watch a movie, it happens. I goes "kkkkkk" or "grrrrr" then resumes. if the nosie is more than 2 seconds long, the system lags, if it's less than 2 seconds long, just the drive makes that noise.

I really can't figure out why it does that, the closest explaination i can think of is that one drive is trying to catch up with another because one has higher cache memory so it writes faster than the other? I don't know..

thanks for reading

The hard drive's cache should be disabled when using them in RAID. Also I do not think the cache works properly in Linux. You have to use the hard drive's utility to turn the cache off and while you are at it turn off autolocation of bad sectors. Hard drives in RAID should be similar models too. A 250 GB Western Digital hard drive has different capacity than the 250 GB Maxtor hard drive.

If you use Linux software RAID, you can check the logs. All hard drives gets hot, so that is not abnormal. It sounds like one or both hard drives are failing. Finding out which one will be hard if you can not disconnect one hard drive. Probably the Maxtor drive is failing.