SG Broadband Community

I've been running raid for quite a while now, and a question popped into my head.

I've never had this problem before. I'm getting prepared just incase

How do I monitor the integrity of the mirrored drives?

How would I know which drive is about to fail or on the verge of failing?

*edit - under XP pro

Most modern drives have a BIOS feature called S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology).

This monitors various conditions of the drive. Now...wether your computer ehas any abilities to fetch the data from SMART, well, most consumer level computers don't. Higher end workstations, better RAID controllers, and servers do. SMART isn't perfect...but I've replaced a lot of hard drives in servers because of it (replace before failure occurs!) Sometimes it cries wolf too. And sometimes the drive has a failure and SMART never spit up any warning.

So check our your RAID controller software, there's just about always some software you can install for your RAID controller card, which monitors the SMART features of your drives. Promise has one..."FastTrak" I think was the name of it.

Run a Google search on SMART hard drives.

My Silicon Image RAID card came with Medley software for monitoring my RAID 0 setup. IT clued me into a problem I didn't know I had too. I was using rounded cables that were too long, longer than the recommended 24 inches. My RAID was dropping back from ATA-133 to ATA-100 because of IO errors. After the first popup warning I checked the logs. Went back to my flat IDE cables and the errors stopped. Got my full rated speed too.

Thanks for the info. It really helps to look ahead in the future and think what might happen to your data if it was lost. Muchos Gracias!