Will fixing a SATA Raid destroy data?

[julitomg]

My homemade PC has an Asus P4 S800D-X motherboard (see my comp details) wich has a Raid ready SATA controller. I have a maxtor IDE drive as " C "(system) and two 200 Gig Maxtor Diamond Max 10 (7,200 )SATA drives for video in a RAID 0 configuration and called "F".
It had worked perfectly until about a week ago when a series of unexpected restarts during CPU intensive tasks (converting avi to mpeg2, etc...)caused the SATA array to dissapear from "My Pc". Checking the admin. tools/disk managment, etc...the C drive seems Ok but the F drive is marked as inactive or something like that. After trying to "reactivate" it at best it was shown in the My PC window as a local disk (but no way to accessing it, it just wouldn´t open)
The next day I turned it on (thinking I had lost the 300 gigs or so of valuable video footage from my job) and to my surprise, it was OK, showing the correct label for disk F and letting me open it, with a sign that "windows has recovered from a serious problem" or something like that. I was able to back up some material to an external drive but made the mistake of trying to encode some video...it crashed again and the F RAID dissapeared once again.
After restarting, and next to the first self test screen this motherboard shows a selt test of every SATA drive in the system (showing disk and UDMA status, etc..)..it said there was a "Broken RAID" and the option to go to another screen with options to delete the RAID, set a new one, etc...
Well, my question is basically this: If I choose to delete the RAID and re-create it, will the files in it will be deleted (as when formatting)?, assuming the drives have not physical damage.
Thanks in advance for your response.

[redwudz]

I would get your data off that RAID 0 set up and just use them as two normal drives myself. RAID 0 is not fault tolerant and if one drive does fail, you lose everything. It was a good choice in the days of slow ATA drives and expensive small and fast SCSI drives but RAID 0 is hazardous to your data. You could use RAID 1, but then you would only have the same drive capacity as one of the RAID drives. But it would be much more fault tolerant and secure. The average ATA drive is plenty fast for most any use, especially the ATA 133 and SATA 150 drives.

When I used RAID 0, the array used to crash on occasion and usually the software would rebuild it automatically. Once or twice I had to do it manually, but I never lost any data. Then one drive died and I lost all of it. This happened a second time and I had enough.

Repairing the array depends on your controller. You usually just rebuild it, which is just another way of saying the drives are resynchronized with each other. None of the data is affected. I would get out my manual for the controller and see what they say. There may be a big difference between rebuilding a RAID array and deleting the RAID. I'm not sure what they mean. You could try rebooting again and see if it rebuilds on it's own.

And back up your valuable data. I always say don't put anything on a hard drive that you can't afford to lose.

[julitomg]

Thanks for your answer. You are right about backing up the files, I usually try to do so, especially job related ones, but for one reason or another they kept accumulating and I was over-confident about my system (valuable lesson)..and yes, I think I´ll forget about the RAID 0 thing, it was overkill anyway since I work mostly with DV AVI files.

[studtrooper]

RAID1 is the best. Never have to worry about backing up. Even in this day and age of cheap DVD media, backing up my critical files on DVD-R would take all day!