Faulty drive in Raid Array? Tool to locate?

[seahorse]

Afternoon

 

I have an Intel RAID Controller SRCSASLS4I running Windows Server 2008 R2 with some recent speed issues.

Some time earlier last year one of the 4 drives in the array died and I replaced it successfully. To my knowledge everything was fine up until a few months ago with no issues to my knowledge until then.

 

The server was demoted from a DC to a WSUS server and as such I started noticing issues with speed when clients updated.

 

My first thoughts were that the replacement drive may be causing an access and write delay due to not being 100% identical to the other drives but following a firmware update of the controller all 4 drives have the same negotiated link speed of 3.0 Gbps despite the new drive being capable of 6.0 Gbps. Before the firmware update the new drive negotiated 1.5 Gbps. Despite this no performance gain has been noticed.

There were no driver updates available.

 

As well as this I noticed that the Write Policy was running at Write Through instead of Write back but this could be down to the controller not having it's own battery backup unit attached. Never the less I changed the setting, rebooted out of curiosity but have not gained any speed.

 

I wonder whether any of the other drives are also faulty despite there being no reports.

 

Can anyone recommend any software that might be able to monitor and detect any defects in the raid array?

[plexer]

If it doesn't have a battery you should use write through.

 

Ben

[seahorse]

It was just an experiment really. I'll change it back at the earliest opportunity.