pofo14

Hello All,
 
I have an opinion question to ask the forum. For years I have been using Drivepool for pooling, and snapraid for protecting myself against drive failure.
 
I am currently running into an unknown issue with snapraid, where my sync command gets stuck at 0%, which I am unable to figure out.
 
That leads me to a point where I am questioning whether I need snapraid. Since I have Scanner along with Drivepool, I am wondering if the evacuation functionality in Scanner can protect me against the drive failures. Essentially if I always ensure that I have at least the capacity of one drive of free space available in my Drivepool I would survive one drive failure.
 
Currently I am running 6 data drives in the pool, along with 2 drives for parity. If I were to just add the parity drives to the pool I would have more than 2 drives worth of "free capacity" for scanner to evacuate to if there was a drive failure.
 
While snapraid has serve me well, and allowed me to recover files, just leveraging scanner / Drivepool could simplify my setup slightly.
 
Just wanted to get the communities thoughts on this.
 
Thanks in advance

First just wanted to start by thanking the community, great support and a lot of useful info in the forums.
 
I recently posted this topic because I was having some issue's getting my "snapraid sync" command to complete and was asking about other options for my setup.  I got some good advice from you guys, as well in the snapraid forum here.  Turns out, one of my parity drives was bad.  Scanner wasn't reporting any issue's with it, and even the snapraid smart command, didn't have any errors.  The snapraid command did say that the parity drive had a 100% chance of failing in the next year, which gave me enough of a clue.  I confirmed this drive was the culprit after running the sync command again, I saw that this specific disk (x:\) was stuck as 100% usage in Task Manager and the snapraid process was "hung".  I also checked the event log to find the following errors happening:
Event 129, storachi - Reset to Device \Device\RaidPort2, was issued. It appears every 30 seconds, from about the time I started the sync commamd (or it "hangs), until I restarted. Event 140: NTFS - The system failed to flush the data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur in VolumeID: X:, Devicename: \Device\HarddiskVolume8 Event 153, disk - The IO Operation at logical block address 0x1 for Disk9 (PDO Name: \Device\00000036) was retired Event 153, disk - The IO Operation at logical block address 0x11 for Disk9 (PDO Name: \Device\00000036) was retired Event 153, disk - The IO Operation at logical block address 0x21 for Disk9 (PDO Name: \Device\00000036) was retired I understand that drives can go bad without Scanner reporting an issue as described in this forum here.  The errors from that post seem identical to one of the errors I have listed above.  Actually I have been struggling with the 129 & 153 warnings for a while as described in this post.  One main question I have is how can I determine the actual physical drive that the 129 and 153 errors are happening for?  I believe based on this experience I have now determined it, but it was really the Event 140 that made it obvious as it listed the drive letter.  Without that I may not have known which drive was causing these problems.  Essentially how can I determine the drive for \Device\RaidPort2 and \Device\00000036?  I am hoping that they are one and the same, and they also point to the drive from Event 140 (x:\).
 
For those interested I got around the snapraid sync issue, but removing the bad drive from my configuration, and reverting to a single parity drive.  After doing that the I ran a full sync, which seems to have completed successfully.  I have a new drive en route to replace the bad parity drive.
 
I really am asking as I want to verify that the three errors above all pertain to the drive I am replacing and not another one currently in my PC.  
 
Any help is much appreciated.  
 
 
EDIT-----
 
I got the brand new drive.  Put it in.  Configured this new drive as a parity drive, tried to run a sync command, and it froze.  In the Event Log I again see the "Event 129, storachi - Reset to Device \Device\RaidPort2, was issued."  So this seems to be an issue when I connect a drive to that SATA Port, or at least when a drive connected to that port attempts to be read / write to.
 
Does this mean it may not be the drive, and perhaps the sata port / controller on the motherboard?
 
Additionally I still get the error below (although the Disk changed from 9 to 12).  If I look in disk Management Tool, Disk 12 is actually one of my Pooled drive in DrivePool, meaning it is one of the Virtual Drives Drivepool creates.  
 
Event 153, disk - The IO Operation at logical block address 0x1 for Disk12 (PDO Name: \Device\00000036) was retired
 
I also notice now :
 
Event 153, disk - The IO Operation at logical block address 0x1 for Disk13 (PDO Name: \Device\00000037) was retired.  
 
Disk 13 in Disk Management is another virtual drive Drivepool creates.
 
The 153 warnings nay not be related to the other issue, as they have nothing to do with snapraid, but I am not sure if those errors are masking an issue with an underlying disk.
 
Thanks in advance,
Ken