Disk failure in 3 disk RAID0 & 5?

Only 11 months after I bought them, 1 of my hard drives just started grinding away like a jet engine... :(
I have OS on RAID 0 and data on RAID 5.
So the data should be safe (unless I'm hearing 2 drives grinding away), but the OS volume is in serious danger.
I have a spare disk that I can replace the bad one with, and I have a backup of my data (on the spare disk). I'm wondering if I should try converting the RAID 0 volume to RAID 5 before replacing the disk or if I should do another backup (the other one is a couple months old)? Which would be safer? I'll probably buy another drive rather than use my backup drive as a spare.

I probably should have had 2 RAID 5 volumes to begin with... But if I lose the OS volume it's no big deal, just the pain of reinstalling the OS and all my software (or at least restoring the OS volume from the old backup).

the more sound it makes, the more power it has, or isin't that how everything works? :P Well, I had a computer running that made the room smell as something was burning ;) worked fine... Until the computer exploded ^^ What a fun night that was xD

My old computer had 3 HD's that were making a ton of noise (it had to have been well above the safe decibel limit) and they ran fine for years like that; but I don't think that's the case here because I noticed that Windows slowed down so much that I thought it was locked up.

I used to have a setup where I had the OS on Raid0 and the data on Raid1, software raid with different partitions. When a HDD died, I still had all the data, but the OS was wiped out. The trouble of restoring that made me vow never to do such a thing again. It's just not worth the trouble. You gain space and speed, but you lose uptime and a lot of time when you have to reinstall.

So ... since your HDD is dead (or you suspect it to be), you have to reinstall anyway. I suggest you make the OS volume RAID5 too. It's so much nicer to swap out a disk and simply boot anew (or even not, if your system supports hot-swapping) instead of going to all that trouble.

I don't know if I should be relieved or worried, but when I turned on my system today to assess the damage, the drives were back to their quiet selves again and Windows was back to full speed. I thought for sure my drive was toast with the horrible noise it was making last night.
I made a new backup just in case.
I was also about to convert my RAID 0 volume to RAID 5, but that option is greyed out. I think it was only available for switching RAID 1 to RAID 5.

Have any of you ever had a drive on it's death bed suddenly make a miraculous recovery like that?

OK my drive finally died enough for my RAID chip to list it as failed and now that I know which of the 3 drives it is, I replaced it. I wiped out my C: drive and changed it over to RAID 5, but for some reason when I tried doing a restore of my Windows backup it said the drive was too small and needed to be the same as the backup... Stupid MS Backup! :mad:
I just did a clean reinstall of Windows and the data volume is rebuilding its RAID 5 data (only 7% in almost 2 hours).

The really strange thing that happened yesterday is that, even though 1 drive was dropped from the array because of its problems, Windows was still booting off of its RAID 0 volume. I didn't know it could drop only half of a drive (the RAID 5 part) but not the other half...

I also downloaded Seagate's "SeaTools" to scan the disks for errors, and it found nothing wrong with any of them. Do you think they'll still replace the drive if their own software says there's nothing wrong with it?

send it in, worst they can do is say the damage isn't covered by warranty :)
Few times I've needed their warranty service, it was quick and professional.

I'm still only 27% done the RAID 5 rebuild!
I left my computer on all night to do the rebuild and then that damned Windows Update rebooted my machine at 3am; and since I had a CD in the drive it tried to boot from the CD, so the system wasn't doing the rebuild for about 8 hours. Then when I came back from shopping I saw that my system was asleep! Why would it go to sleep when it's obviously busy doing something important? :mad:
I wish I could meet Bill Gates so I could slap some sense into him...

because the screensaver mechanism controls the wake/sleep cycles and there had been no screen activity.
You're running a desktop operating system, optimised for desktop duties, thus shouldn't be surprised if it's desktop centered ;)

And don't blame Bill Gates, he didn't write that code. If he ever wrote code for Windows it'd have been very early versions, which didn't go to sleep :D

So what you're trying to say is, he should find Bill Gates and give him a big box of chocolates instead of a slap?

When the failed disk isn't running in RAID does "SeaTools" or any other (well established) software say the drive is dead? If so then you should argue over warranty -- I'm pretty sure it doesn't say "We'll only fix it if SeaTools says it's dead".

As for the failure after such a short period, do you cool your disks? Perhaps you just got a lemon :-)

I don't know if BG likes chocolate, but it would certainly be a nice gesture.

Perhaps, a Linux workstation instead? ;). Because I bet if you mailed him chocolate he wouldn't eat them :(

Yes, my case has 2 big fans in the front, 1 or 2 in the back and a HUGE fan on the top. Everything stays cool.
SeaTools only saw 2 drives when my BIOS was set to RAID, so I had to set it to IDE to see all 3 drives. No problems found.