hard drive on RAID 5 array dying.

i have 5 Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6L300S0 300 gig HDD's on a raid 5 array using a rocketraid 2320 controller card. recently my computer had been randomly going into a screaming fit as an alert sounded from inside the case. i fugred out it was one of the 5 hard drives, and that the controller says it's critical and degraded, but nothing more. is there a tool or something that can tell me what's wrong with it, so maybe i can see if it can be fixed, or does this description pretty much say my drive is gonna die?

also, if the drive dies, how do i go about keeping my data intact as soon as possible, and do i need the same size hard drive to replace the one that broke? thanks for the help in advance.

You'll probably lose all your data on all your disks.  RAID is not a good thing, end of discussion.

you will die a slow and painful one

that doesn't really help me...

raid is only bad if there's no parity or mirroring. streight stripping is shit, but atleast raid5 keeps a drive on the side for data recovery purposes...

RAID 5 is nice. Your RAID controller will be able to rebuild the array if a drive fails- pretty much, as soon as you can, replace the drivethat's farked.

Your might be different, but normally- unplug the broken drive, plug the new one in, then do the rebuild action (you'll need to read your RAID manual for that).

And yeah, you should get a 300 gig HD, otherwise you;'ll need to reformat your whole HD.

>>5
thanks. that's all i needed to know :)