Raid Drives aren't showing up

Hi all

Got a problem here with my 4.5 Tb raid drive that has recently started disappearing / or not booting up at all. It's an internal drive partitioned in 1.5Tb sections.

I've tried running Disk Utility on it and it says:

Verifying volume “RAID Set 1”
Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.

(i hit repair)
Verify and Repair volume “RAID Set 1”
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.

...and now it's just chugging away.
Perhaps because it's a big drive i should expect this to take a while. but it's been 2 hours now. so I'm worried it's stuck.

has anyone had this before?

Could really do with some help there's lots of important stuff on this drive.

Thanks

...oh great.

now it's saying:

Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

And the drive is makeing a funny clicking noise.

I thought the whole point of raiding a drive is that this doesn't happen?

hmm... any suggestions anyone.... anything at all?

What raid level is it?

good question. I didn't set it up and I don't know much about raiding drives, but I think it's level one. it's a single drive split into 3 disks.

it's called:

4.5 TB - "RAID set 1" - Stripped RAID set
1.5 TB - RAID SLICE (disk3s2)
1.5 TB - RAID SLICE (disk2s2)
1.5 TB - RAID SLICE (disk1s2)

... oh it's appeared again now!

- I'm trying to copy the important stuff off it now, but it keeps clicking and stop starting during the copy...

Will formatting it help the disk or is it a fatal error?

Ahhh RAID 0. This particular RAID type is designed for maximum drive space and performance. There is NO fault tolerance (redundancy)built in.

See the following link for more information (since I really don't feel like typing that much)

Standard RAID levels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

oh fantastic.

looks like I'm going to formate the thing (as it's just crashed again)
... got the important stuff off it first though.

thanks for your help. I'll RAID it properly next time...