# Server crashing during file transfers



## shuckthatjive (Aug 19, 2007)

I recently built a small computer mostly for media storage and installed Windows Server 2008 R2. It's based off a E35M1-I Deluxe motherboard with a built-in AMD 3-350 APU. I have one Western Digital system drive and four Hitachi drives in a Windows-managed RAID 5 for media.

Since putting it together I've had it crash on me multiple times, most often during large file transfers. It crashed once when I was trying to copy a ~300 GB folder to its RAID from another computer over the network, once when I was using it as a local Minecraft server (on the system drive) for one computer in the house, and once when I simply had some torrents downloading at high speed. I thought it might be a networking issue, but it also happened twice when trying to transfer large amounts of data from a drive connected via eSATA to the RAID.

Each time it crashes, Remote Desktop and any shared folders open on the client computer disconnect, and the HDD activity light, which is normally on constantly for "resynching" of the RAID, goes dark. It doesn't reconnect or resume HDD activity until I reboot. Event Viewer doesn't show any errors from the time of the crash, but there is one at the time I reboot, saying "the previous shutdown at [the time of the crash] was unexpected."

When these crashes happen, it's usually within a half hour to an hour of starting the activity that I think is crashing it (the file trasnfer/Minecraft server/bittorrent). I've left it to idle for up to a day so far without any kind of problems. Any idea what could be going on?


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## Rockn (Jul 29, 2001)

Improper RAID controller drivers in Server 2008, bad NIC drivers, it could be any number of things and since it is a PC running as a server on Server 2008 I am sure there are any number of unsupported pieces of hardware that could be causing the issus.


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## shuckthatjive (Aug 19, 2007)

I don't have a RAID controller card, so no drivers to worry about. The drives in the RAID volume are connected right to the mobo's SATA channels, and the RAID volume's created and managed by Windows' Disk Management utility. Besides, the problem occurs even when the system drive is active and the RAID volume is idle.

Don't think it's the NIC, because as I said, there are crashes even when data is transferring locally through eSATA and nothing is going over the network.

Anything I can do to try to narrow down the problem some more?


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## Rockn (Jul 29, 2001)

Disconnect the network cable when doing a local transfer. There should probably be some srt of disk diags you could run on your drives from the manyfacturers to rule drive issues. Just because the eSATA controller is not being used does not mean the controller or hte drivers that control it are not at issue. What is the make and model of the motherboard these drives are connected to? Software RAID is completely unreliable if you want to have data integrity.


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