I seem to be having trouble with my server. *sigh*

Twice today the 4 drives on the RAID card have vanished with a few nasty looking errors in the Event Log. After the first time I rebooted it and they came back, when it happened again a few hours later I decided not to risk it until I had plan and just shut down.

If I understand correctly, due to the way RAID works, if the controller card fails I'm likely to lose all of the data on the four 500GB drives, about 800GB of music and videos in total. So I've decided to rescue as much as I can (hopefully all of it) as quick as possible, and then break the RAID putting the disks back separately instead of spanned across all of them. It just takes a lot of time copying that much data around!

I've hooked my 500GB Seagate FreeAgent drive up to the server and have been copying ALL of my music onto it - doing this first as I've paid for a large chunk of the tracks there. Once the music is backed up, I can start on the videos. I snagged a new 500GB drive from PC World on my way home which will be able to take the majority of them, but I'll have to dump the rest on the remaining space of the FreeAgent drive.

I'm a little stressed right now, worried the RAID card will completely fail before I can get all the data off. Fingers crossed!

UPDATE:
The nasty error messages are as follows:

Event ID: 9
Description: The device, \Device\Harddisk4, is not ready for access yet.

Event ID: 15
Description: The device, \Device\Scsi\Si3114r51, did not respond within the timeout period.

Event ID: 12
Description: The device 'SiImage SCSI Disk Device' (*snip*) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

Event ID: 57
Description: The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur.

I have managed to copy off all of the music and a big chunk of the videos but I seem to have hit a snag with the new drive I fitted internally. For some reason it was transferring at a snail's pace, and after 6 hours the RAID finally died. I was surprised at how slowly it was going, compared to the USB external drive.

I think what I'm going to have to do is remove the new SATA drive, and stick it in my old PC, then rescue the last bit of data by transferring it over the network.

I'll be so glad when/if I've saved everything!

UPDATE 2: I've transferred everything finally! Ordered a new RAID card, same as the old one. I'd love to be able to get a better more reliable brand but unfortunately there aren't many cards made for PCI any more! All I need is PCI-Express but that's an expensive upgrade, replacing almost everything.