IRST Disk Utility

[Gnarly]

Greetings!

Is anyone aware of a utility for checking your RAID volume integrity? I have looked at Intel and cannot find anything. Perhaps I am not looking hard enough. Maybe a third party app? The only app that is available is the one that is included with the driver software. This is great for creating another volume and adding disks, but does nothing else.


TIA!

[Retired]

The Hviz ????????

I know you love RAID.......;)

[HiVizMan]

grottslampan wrote:
The Hviz ????????

I know you love RAID.......;)

You just saying that because my RAID crashed yesterday - lol

[HiVizMan]

http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/drive-monitor/

The thing is most RAID controllers do not provide access to the hard disks inside the arrays. The controller completely hides all physical disk information - that's why the real disk type and S.M.A.R.T. information (including temperature and health) are not displayed for hardware RAID arrays, regardless of the type (0, 1, etc...) of the array.

A possible solution is to use a completely OS controlled software RAID array. This way the disks provide full information without problems. It is officially possible by using "Server" editions of Windows.

But none of that is relevant for SSD's as you do not get warning before they die on you. The only thing is to back up daily as you know you are going to get a hard drive failure.

[Retired]

Ops, did it........:p

i did not knew that...... [my nose is growing]:o

[Gnarly]

Mine did last week!

A hassle indeed.

I would like to be proactive!

[Gnarly]

Okay. That is basically what I figured. I am going to switch from striped to 5. The one failing drive went after 3 months. I RMA'ed it. It was a Kingston. I am truly partial to Samsung.

Thanks HiViz!

[HiVizMan]

if you have a couple of SSD's, oh like 4 of them laying around you can do RAID 1 + 0 That will give you some good speed plus security. I tend to stay away from RAID 0 + 1

[Menthol]

HiVizMan, first I have to say you have more patience than anyone I know, you help everyone no mater the issue calm and cool. Know I have to ask why do you stay away from 0+1. Besides the fact it can be expensive and use 4 ports.

[HiVizMan]

The difference between RAID 0 + 1 and 1 + 0 is slight but very signficant. Both need at least 4 SATA connections so it is not the physical reason why I suggest that Raid 1 + 0 is better.

Both RAID 0+1 and RAID 1+0 are multiple RAID levels which means that they are created by taking a number of disks and then dividing them up into sets. And within each of these sets, a single RAID level is applied to it in order to form the arrays. Then, the second RAID level is applied at the top of it to form the nested array. RAID 1+0 is also called as a stripe of mirrors and RAID 0+1 is also called as a mirror of stripes based on the nomenclature used for RAID 1 (mirroring) and RAID 0 (striping).


The difference is actually in the fault tolerance. Let’s look at the two steps that we mentioned above in more detail:

RAID 1+0:
Drives 1+2 = RAID 1 (Mirror Set A)
Drives 3+4 = RAID 1 (Mirror Set B)
Drives 5+6 = RAID 1 (Mirror Set C)

If drive 5 fails, then only the mirror set C is affected. It still has drive 6 so it will continue to function and the entire RAID 1+0 array will keep functioning. Now, suppose that while the drive 5 was being replaced, drive 2 fails, then also the array is fine because drive 2 is in a different mirror set. So, bottom line is that in the above configuration 3 drives can fail without effecting the array as long as they are all in different mirror sets. I build RAID arrays of 20 drives using this configuration.

Now, let’s look at what happens in RAID 0+1:

RAID 0+1:
Drives 1+2+3 = RAID 0 (Stripe Set A)
Drives 4+5+6 = RAID 0 (Stripe Set B)

Here two stripe sets are mirrored. If one of the drives, say drive 5 fails, the entire set B fails. The RAID 0+1 is still fine since we have the stripe set B. If say drive 2 also goes down, your RAID array is broken.

Hope that made sense.