Hi...I am getting a message that the RAID Array is degrading on one of my hard drives. I believe it is the drive that backs-up the PC's info. The icon in the tray shows two stacks of what looks like coins and one of em is flashing red. Does anyone know a fix for this, or do I need to get a new PC? This PC is a DELL that I bought in 2006. Is this a common occurance? Can replacing the defective HD solve the problem?
Thanks to all in advance for your help.

GTO67

Hi, it sounds like you have one of the few desktop PCs that Dell shipped in 2006/2007 with a RAID "mirror" hard drive configuration (RAID 1). I can't remember what they called it - DataSafe or something like that. It meant that you had two hard drives and one would automatically replicate onto the other, even though they might only appear as a single C:\ drive in Windows.

The point of a RAID mirror is that, if one hard drive fails, the other carries on working with an exact replica of all the same files. It sounds like one of the two hard drives has failed and, therefore, the RAID has been degraded, i.e. the two drives are no longer synchronising.

If you are comfortable with opening your PC and if it is out of warranty, my recommendation would be:
1. Create a new file on your desktop and wait 10 minutes, then shut the PC down and disconnect the power;
2. Open the case and disconnect one of the two hard drives;
3. Start the PC up and see if the new file that you created is still there. If it isn't, the drive that is still connected is the one that is the "backup" drive and is not being synchronised. If the new file is still present, then you are still running off of the "master" drive and it's all up-to-date.

Once you know which is the drive that is up-to-date, you can decide to either:

1. Ignore the problem - you've still got everything working OK on one hard drive;
2. Back up the PC really well and carry out some diagnostics to determine if there was just a glitch with the RAID synchronisation or whether the disconnected hard drive is truly faulty.

The reason that I say that you should back up the PC really well is because messing about with RAID configurations and replacing RAID hard drives can be a real headache. It's very easy to make a mistake and overwrite your good drive with the contents of the bad drive, i.e. lose all your recent stuff and, potentially, wreck Windows, meaning that you have to re-install everything from scratch.

Most home users with Dell's mirrored hard drives didn't really understand what they were buying, or why, and so most would be perfectly happy just having one hard drive with all the data, like 99% of other PC users. Mirrored hard drives configurations are usually only found in servers used in business environments.

Hope that helps.