Computer crashed, help needed

[Lason]

Ok so first off I have 2 crucial M4 120gb drives in raid 0 and a big mechanical drive for storing stuff. Os is windows 7 pro.

Logged on my pc and a flash update appeared so I updated it and noticed it putting macaffee on there. Un installed that right away. Then a pop up from my geforce software popped up with an update but locked up as I tried to update it. I restarted and it booted to my desktop fine but all my icons are gone, all the windows tools folders are empty, etc. I check the drives properties and my mechanical drive seems full but my main raid drives show 186gb free out of 240 even though I had less than 5gb free before the crash.

Anyone have any ideas? I have no problem wiping the drive and starting over but I don't know if one of my drives is going or what. Never had a issue like this.

Sent from my Note 3, excuse the typos.......

[Tx Redneck]

Man, I've never dealt with this or any raid environments as far as that's concerned. I'd be tempted to run chkdsk from RE and see what that nets.

[Lason]

Had a dentist appt so I didn't have much time to mess with it but I popped in the windows disk to see if it would repair itself and load some recovery tools. It treated it like an upgrade and reinstalled windows. My restore files are on the mechanical drive but windows still won't use them and gave a weird error. I had 90% of the important crap copied on the mechanical drive so I may just wipe and do a fresh install. It was about time anyway. Just real weird how it happened.

Sent from my Note 3, excuse the typos.......

[roliath]

it could have gone to last known good config, that would explain your icons' missing. but as far as I know lng isn't supposed to delete data. your installed programs should have still been there.

no backups?

[Lason]

No it wasnt last known config, it was real weird. ALL my program folders were there, even the windows folders but they were all empty. When it booted up, it booted up to a black background and all these error messeges from programs that start with windows saying the program is either missing or corrupt.

I did have backups on the mechanical drive but when I tried restoring using them I got weird errors. I had 99% of the important stuff I needed on my other drive so it was no big deal, just really weird.

[Ratt]

MEchanical drive failure. Not SSDs' fault.

Edit: Why would you raid the OS drives and not the storage drives? That seems kinda bass-ackwards.

[roliath]

MEchanical drive failure. Not SSDs' fault.

Edit: Why would you raid the OS drives and not the storage drives? That seems kinda bass-ackwards.

My os drives are raided. Its imaged every night though, so if they fail ill just restore from backups.
20min downtime max.

[Tx Redneck]

Braggart

[Lason]

MEchanical drive failure. Not SSDs' fault.

Edit: Why would you raid the OS drives and not the storage drives? That seems kinda bass-ackwards.

I have the OS's drives in raid 0 for speed. I also store my games on those drives too.

I do probably need need to get another mechanical drive and raid it for redundancy.

[Tx Redneck]

They're ssd's, is one not fast enough on its own?
Edit:Not criticizing, just curious.

[Lason]

My os drives are raided. Its imaged every night though, so if they fail ill just restore from backups.
20min downtime max.

Do you use a 3rd party program to do it?

I had/have windows setup to do a backup everynight at 3am but like I said, it wouldnt allow me to use the backups. I thought that after I wiped and reinstalled windows that I may use a backup still on the mechanical drive. After I reinstalled windows though it wiped that backup file and created a new one.

[Lason]

They're ssd's, is one not fast enough on its own?
Edit:Not criticizing, just curious.

Sure they are, just when I built this thing it didnt make much sense to get bigger than 120gb ssd's due to the prices at the time so I bought 2 120's and raided them for a bit more space. Later on I added the mechanical drive.

[roliath]

Do you use a 3rd party program to do it?

I had/have windows setup to do a backup everynight at 3am but like I said, it wouldnt allow me to use the backups. I thought that after I wiped and reinstalled windows that I may use a backup still on the mechanical drive. After I reinstalled windows though it wiped that backup file and created a new one.

I use macrium reflect to create the images, and its scheduled nightly.
As long as you have space basically.

[Ratt]

I have the OS's drives in raid 0 for speed. I also store my games on those drives too.

I do probably need need to get another mechanical drive and raid it for redundancy.

That makes a little bit of sense, but if you RAID 0 two SSDs, you don't get the benefit of garbage collection and TRIM. The speed increase with a 2 x SSD RAID 0 setup versus one SSD with twice the storage is negligible. I do understand cost being a factor, though. I want a Samsung 840 EVO 500 GB, but I'm trying to wait and see if they will come down to around 220 or less to buy one. I want to be able to store everything on my gaming computer (250+ GB of games installed currently, plus OS and about 20 GB of music and pictures) on the SSD and not have to rely on a mechanical drive at all.

I'm getting to the mindset of TX Redneck where I don't want to work on a computer at all unless it has an SSD.

[roliath]

That makes a little bit of sense, but if you RAID 0 two SSDs, you don't get the benefit of garbage collection and TRIM. The speed increase with a 2 x SSD RAID 0 setup versus one SSD with twice the storage is negligible. I do understand cost being a factor, though. I want a Samsung 840 EVO 500 GB, but I'm trying to wait and see if they will come down to around 220 or less to buy one. I want to be able to store everything on my gaming computer (250+ GB of games installed currently, plus OS and about 20 GB of music and pictures) on the SSD and not have to rely on a mechanical drive at all.

I'm getting to the mindset of TX Redneck where I don't want to work on a computer at all unless it has an SSD.

Sata3 SSD's raided, even shit ones will give you 1GB read/write speeds.(or super close to it) I would say its worth it, if you can use all that speed.

Depending on what SSDs you use, Trim is supported in raid as well.