Recovering from a RAID Controller Failure

There are many reasons why a RAID goes down.  A technician will normally assume that one or more of the drives have failed.  This is a common diagnosis as the diagnostic lights on each of the drives may be blinking, the lights may have gone amber, or... 

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Network Attached Storage NAS and Other Nightmares

Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices have been a boon for storage technology.  What a great windfall for the industry.  Grab yourself an Open Source operating system, stick it on a prom, get yourself an inexpensive motherboard, some hard drives and... 

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End User Raid Zero Array Crash

I had a client call me the other day and tell me that her two year old two terabyte drive had crashed and all of her pictures of her children, as well as her wedding were on the drive. She did not have a backup and was very upset. I knew that there was... 

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Recovering a Spanned RAID Set Without RAID Software

  Recently it was my displeasure to work on a three drive spanned set for NT 4.0.  The set was soft configured so when the boot drive went down, with all of the configuration data for the RAID on it, the RAID would not mount.  In addition to that,... 

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Use Bad Block Frequency to determine RAID 5 stale drive

We have been discussing the love affair I have with stale drives in a RAID five array and how best to determine if in fact one exists. I explained how the NTFS file system data is normally laid out and the fact the old and new data, as well as how... 

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RAID Configuration and Parity Check

The function set for the inaugural offering of RAID Diagnostic Toolkit is very basic. This post will explain how to choose a set of ‘streams’ to build a ‘RAID set’. Initially the software does not have any options for stripe size,... 

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