Cavalry Dual-Bay Dock, RAID 1, and other technology problem happened all in one day

My tech disaster day started when I found out that my Galaxy Nexus phone ran out of battery, even though I have the charge cable hooked up over night.  Later I found out that it was the cable that had problem.  That cheesy micro USB cable I brought form Hong Kong was malfunction.  No problem, though, as I had a few spares.  But then that's just the prelude of all the mess.

Then I found out that the Z Drive of my closet server machine wasn't working.  I should have known it because there was a lot of hanging happening on that drive, but I didn't pay close attention to it and merely just restart the Cavalry Dual-Bay Dock.  Since the Z drive is actually 2 harddisk running on RAID 1 on this dual bay dock, I was a bit worry that problem was happening on both drives.  Sure enough, when I use Windows 8 scan disk feature to check these 2 discs, I found that both of them had problem, and both of them FAILED to have the problem fixed even after I ran scan disk multiple times.  On one disk, the fixing stuck at the 5% point of the scanning.  On the other disk, scanning was completed, but the problem shows up again after I scanned it again.  Obviously I couldn't rely on both disks anymore, and need to find another harddisk to host the data on these 2 harddisk.

I have 2 spare 3 Terabyte harddisks, so I thought I was pretty safe.  That, however, actually led me to realize another problem: harddisk bigger than 2Tb was NOT supported by Acronis Disk Director 11.  That means if I use these 3Tb discs to store data, I can't use Disk Director to manipulate or fix problems.  Harddisk with bigger than 2Tb size stores partition in different format.  That got me into trouble, since I used one 3Tb harddisk to replicate data from the problem "Z drive" with RAID 1 replication, and I original thought of merely expanding the 2Tb partition into 3Tb, thus optimize the usage of the harddisk while preserving everything I had in the 2Tb harddisk.  But because of the 2Tb limitation, I couldn't do that, and had to instead do file copy old school style, which will probably take 1.5 days based on my estimation.  To be honest would be totally ok with it as long as the copying process was a success.

Speaking of copying, during all sort of disk manipulation, I accidentally wipe out a small part of my W drive, which contains all of my movies.  That, of course, send me into major panic mode.  Luckily, I yanked out the harddisk quick enough, and thus the damage was 90% reversible.  It involved:

•  Set Cavalry Dual-Bay Dock into JBOD mode (no longer in RAID 1)
• Using Acronis Disk Director 11 to assign a drive letter to the problem disc
• Use scan feature in Acronis Disk Director 11 to fix the problem

The mess happened because I accidentally let the RAID 1 replication kicked in.  That's when I realized that on Cavalry Dual-Bay Dock:

• RAID 1 replication does NOT care if the source hard disk is on Hard disk 1 or Hard disk 2.
• It happens when the USB cable IS connected to a PC.  (So no computer-less RAID replication)
• To make a hard disk the source, it should:
• have a drive letter assigned
• available for consumption on Windows Explorer
• To make a hard disk the copy destination, it should:
• have NO drive letter assigned

In fact, the RAID replication process DOES NOT CARE if the destination disk has content in it.  All it cares was whether the disk have drive letter assigned.  That was exactly how my W drive being accidentally copied over because it doesn't no have letter assigned at the moment I plug the drive into the dual-bay dock.

To prevent the same mess happening, I will use this following workflow to prepare discs for RAID 1 replication: 

• Make sure there's only one disk on the dock at any giving moment during preparation.
• Prepare source disk by making sure that it shows up on Windows Explorer.
• Prepare destination disk by removing all the partitions, and thus no visible partition on Windows explorer.  
• To replicate, first put in the source disk, and make sure that it shows up on Windows Explorer.  
• Then put the destination disk at another available slot.

That process led me to experience yet another thing that didn't experience before.  I saw that in the Disk Management has the following message showed up: "The disk is offline because it has a signature collision with another disk that is online"  Someone suggested an answer, and then there's another one.  I haven't tried neither one yet, so I won't make any comment until I tried it myself.

Finally, I was a bit frustrated as most of time of my Sunday was spent on fixing this mess.  The problem was first discovered last night, and then I continue working on it this morning before going to church, and then continue working on it when I got back home.  By now that I have everything documented, it's 8 pm already.  And yet I am still looking at the W drive on my desktop and Z drive on my closet server keeps copying files.  It will probably take another one day or so to have everything copied.  This is when I realize that it's time to gradually migrate these docks and my home machines to USB 3.0.  Otherwise I have to continue dealing with the fact that it takes 1 to 2 days to replicate a 2Tb harddisk.