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Verifying integrity of RAID drives
Greetings again – After my long battle with a problem that turned out to be simple (see thread a few below this one), I began to think, “Is there a better way than through the controller card’s GUI that I can verify the integrity of each drive in an Array?” Although the HighPoint GUI is supposed to make me aware of problems with specific drives, it doesn’t really do that in practice. Is there a third party tool that will check the separate disks in a RAID 5 array for possible problems?
Thanks,
Hop -
4 Replies
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3rd party utilities only see the whole array, not individual drives.
Top tier controllers have decent RAID management and monitoring utilities though.
HTH
Alex (DV411)
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Yeah – Highpoint’s apparently stinks. When you use “Verify” it goes through the process for 4 hours and doesn’t tell you Jack at the end of it.
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At the time of rebuilding the array you have the option of taking out each drive and running it through utilities in another computer for the best testing that is available by software, if time permits. You also might be able to do the same by leaving the signal cables on all drives but leaving on only the power plug on the drive in test on your RAID box and let the controller see a single drive as a single drive. (Some hook ups make this electromechanically hard). Then there is what we could do with old type hard drives not too easily and modern ones with much difficulty, which is, to put new bought hard drives on their backs and go over them when they are running an interleave test, with the probe of practically a DuMont of an oscilloscope and solder on tiny brass loop electrodes wherever we find playback signals after the pre-amplifiers and servos. (If we cross out a connection accidentally we have to buy a new hard drive but at least we have not lost any data). Of course, this is something every magnetic maedia drive manufacturer from floppy and tape drive makers on up should already have provided us along side of a circuit diagram; but let`s face it, the computer crowd are the fast boys and not watching if the manufacturers pull the wool over their eyes. The manufacturers have not taken the time to offer this integrity as a sales pitch of quality either. Leo Laporte on, ¨This Week In Amateur Radio Incorporated¨ sometimes mentions his favorite hard drive testing software but I don`t remember its name.
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Thanks for weighing in. I guess checking for problems ahead of time is simply a difficult road when you’re talking about 8+ drive arrays. Being an editor that has to deliver shows to national TV on a weekly basis, I don’t have time to do difficult checks for symptoms before they break into full-blown disease, unless I can get help from software. I will look away from HighPoint for my next RAID controller….that’s the lesson I’ve learned.
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