Windows XP Email Notifications When a Drive Fails

Posted by admin on March 31, 2009 at 12:00 am
Filed under: How To, Software Pick of the Week, Tutorial, Windows

Worried about not getting to your software RAID 1 or 5 in time to replace a failed drive? DiskCheckup for Windows XP solves this problem by notifying users by email when a drive fails. DiskCheckup also lets users view the SMART details of a hard drive to see highly detailed information about the drive. The best part is that DiskCheckup if free for personal use.

Step #1

First go to http://www.passmark.com/products/diskcheckup.htm and download DiskCheckup.
1-download-disk-checkup
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Simple RAID Explanation covering JBOD and RAID Levels 0, 1, 5 and 6

Posted by admin on March 3, 2009 at 4:17 am
Filed under: Explanation

What’s the difference between RAID 0 and 1? Is RAID 5 the best? If you find yourself asking these questions here’s a quick summary of the standard RAID levels. For the sake of simplicity, I’m only going to cover JBOD, RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID 6.

JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) or Spanned Array

JBOD isn’t an official RAID setup, but most RAID setups offer it as an option. A JBOD array basically takes a bunch of disks and turns them into one big partition. JBOD offers no redundancy and with some RAID setups, the failure of one disk in the array will cause the whole JBOD array to fail. Unlike RAID 0, a JBOD array reads and writes at the same speed as a normal disk.

RAID 0 or Striped RAID

The first level of RAID is RAID 0, commonly referred to as striped RAID. This level of RAID is only for users looking for speed. RAID 0 requires at least two drives. RAID 0 is very dangerous for users looking for reliability. If one disk in the RAID array dies the whole array is trashed. Generally the more disks in the array the faster read and write times will be, but the greater the chance of the array failing. The size of a RAID 0 array is the size of all the drives in the array combined.

RAID 1 or Mirrored RAID

The second level is RAID 1, also know as mirrored RAID. This level of RAID will increase reliability, but requires two drives of the same size. RAID 1 makes an exact copy of a hard drive therefore using 50% of the total storage for redundancy. For example, if a user has two 500GB hard drives making their array 1TB they will have 500GB of actual storage. In most RAID setups, RAID 1 will increase the the read speed but will slightly decrease the write speed.
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