In a previous blog post, I bemoaned the time it takes to recover after a computer hard drive fails. (http://lorsconsultingllc.blogspot.com/2010/07/ouch.html)
Well, here we are less than one year later and it happened again!! But this time, because I had implemented RAID, things were much different. Boy am I glad I did.
(Click the link above to read my previous post explaining RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks), how it works, and that many newer PCs have the capability.)
This time when the drive quit, I kept right on using my PC. In fact, I didn’t even realize the drive had failed until I noticed a little error message pop up in the notification area. And because I was super busy, I didn’t stop to fix it for a couple days.
At my first opportunity, I got the serial number off the drive and submitted the paperwork to Seagate for warranty repair. After removing the defective drive, I replaced it with the good one. When I powered up my PC, it immediately reported that it had found the new drive and asked me to confirm that I wanted that new drive to be used for the currently ‘broken’ RAID array. I of course said yes, and it spent the next six hours rebuilding the mirror so that my whole system was redundant once again (I could use my PC during this time, but it was noticeably sluggish).
Wow! Only minimal downtime at a more convenient time, and no data loss whatsoever. Spending the money for a redundant drive to implement a mirrored RAID array has turned out to be well worth it.
1 comment:
Good timing for this post. Our church computer went down & in talking to the repair tech I thought to ask for a mirrored RAID this time around. Thx.
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