I have two 2TB drives with 4 partitions in a Windows7 software RAID1. (Mirror.) Whenever the system bluescreens, all 4 partitions have to be resynched, no matter if they were actually being read from or written to when the system went down. When the resync begins, Windows tries to resync ALL VOLUMES AT ONCE, which means the heads have to ROCKET from the innermost to the outermost areas of the platters at WARP-10. Resynching one Volume takes about 1 minute per percent, = 400 minutes (or roughly 7 hours) for all four volumes. What this means to the drives should be obvious even to the emptiest of heads, and it probably would be if they ever heard the noises that the poor drives emit during that time. It is akin to a 7 hour burn-in test in bruteforce-mode, and this every single time the system isnt able to shutdown cleanly. (BSOD, PowerOutage, system hangs completely and has to be forced off, etc.) Theoretically this could happen once every day. How long is a pair of harddrives supposed to go along with this? Personally i cant think of any way to make this system any more stupid than it is. First of all there could be a check to see if a Volume was actually being written to before wrongfully declaring its data 'out of sync'. If nothing has been written to a Volume when the system went down then the data can obviously not have been altered on either main or mirror. Ergo the data cannot be out of sync, ergo a resync is but a huge waste of the users time, plus it puts a totally unnecessary strain on the harddrives. If such a check is too much to ask for then the resynching could at least be done Volume-by-Volume, from first to last. In that case the data would be streamed back smoothly from the inner area to the outer area without the heads rocketing back and forth for 7 hours like theres no tomorrow. This is exactly what im doing now, by the way, otherwise my drives would probably be toast by now. In only wonder why i have to do this manually when Microsofts well-payed people could have made the app smart enough in the 1st place? Or do they just sort of slap some code-bits together without actually checking to see if the outcome is actually fit for the intended purpose? Like i said, i really wonder who programmed this thing. I just HATE unintelligent applications...
BTW, the above is obviously a rant. Theres little you can do when you cannot mount your encrypted HDDs because of a resync, so all i can do at the moment is letting off some steam. If you have any ideas on how to improve the situation, im all ear... (I dont want a hardware RAID.)