RAID - "Failed"

[mikes63737]

Does this mean the drive itself failed, or that the filesystem or something else software- based failed?

[blodwyn]

Most likely the drive failed. If the filesystem failed, it would show up on both the drives in the mirror.

[yellow]

Drive failed.

If you select the drive in the slice, it should tell you the SMART status at the bottom of the window.

[mikes63737]

OK, here's the weird thing - I unplugged the drive that "failed" and the other drive. I rebooted and plugged them back in. The drive that "failed" is now mounting just fine and it seems that it got removed from the RAID. Now, the other drive doesn't mount.

Now I don't know what's wrong, but I moved my data off of the drive that works onto another external... should I try reformatting the drives?

And Disk utility says "SMART Status: Not Supported" so I'm not sure what to do.

Since they're acting weird like that I think it's just an OS error (which almost cost me a few GB of data!)

[yellow]

Oh darn. Smart status isn't supported on external firewire drives. :(
Only on internal disks.

[mikes63737]

The sad thing is that these drives aren't even a month old yet. I reformatted them and I have my data backed up on a third drive.

Is there any way besides removing the drive and plugging it into a PC's SATA port to check SMART status? Preferably on my Mac :) (BTW they're USB drives in case it matters) [Edit: Google says no...]

I actually planned on using these drives to do offsite backup, but I decided to put them into a RAID for some temporary storage. Do you think that it's still safe to keep using them?

[yellow]

I think it's in your best interest to get them attached as internal drives however you can and check the SMART status. While it's not 100% reliable, it's fairly reliable and if it says that one of those disks is anything but "verified".. get it replaced and save yourself a headache down the road.