im back

after a small incident with my raid 0 configuration which was starting to cause random BSOD's and lockups which would require a hard shut down. i've decided to go back to 2 single drives. but i am wondering if someone with the knowledge in dealing with raided hard drives could tell me what programs i can use to monitor the 'health' of the array so i can avoid this in the future if i decide to go back using raid 0.

 

ughh its been so awesome without you around here and now your back /sarcasm

Thats the risk of using RAID 0 man, I couldnt tell u any programs.

 

Any program with S.M.A.R.T monitoring.

 

I enable smart on nvmonitor.

 

thanks for the love nars.

@iata: which program with smart monitoring would you recommend?

 

On the rare occasion that I check I use HD Tune Pro.

 

I would be very surprised to hear of any S.M.A.R.T monitoring program that would be able to look at the individual drives of a raid array, as this would mean it would have to be able to pass through the controller...

In your search for a S.M.A.R.T monitoring program that would work on a RAID array (I don't think you'll find one, but I could be wrong), make sure you don't confuse it with a simple raid monitoring program, which wouldn't do the same thing.

HDTune isn't really suitable for testing RAID drives. It doesn't use the filesystem on the harddisk to do its testing, it communicates with the hardware directly. As a consequence, most of the important tools used by S.M.A.R.T monitoring, such as Read Ahead, wouldn't be supported. HDTune was actually created to look at bare hard drives, I would be extremely skeptical of any information it gives you about your RAID array.

glad to see you back diablo!

 

As I said I don't use it very often, but I've just checked it and yes it's not showing any info for the RAID array. It all depends on the RAID chipset as to whether it passes on S.M.A.R.T info. This however is irrelevant to diablo as he is no longer running a RAID setup.

 

thanks jakamo. i've been around, just havent been posting much.

while it is true that i am no longer running a raid setup, i do forsee me going back to a raid setup, as i regularly transfer large amounts of data to my external, and i got really used to having a 40 second or less power on to fully usable desktop boot time, hence why i asked if there is a program worth a to monitor the smart data for drives in a raid setup.

thanks for your input though, iaTa.

 

Do you use eSATA for your external?

 

yes indeed, and as the space on my external dwindles down, i am very close to buying another 1tb or larger external.

 

Amazing deal at tigerdirect for Seagate 1.5TB with 15% off at the min...

Have you thought about using one of the OCZ Core SSDs with the SteadyState fix? Can pickup a 128GB for $195 and will give you stunning performance.

 

SSD's arent an option for me right now, as i would rather have space for storage instead of performance. but with raid i get a balance of the 2 for less than the cost of 1 ssd.

in the future when the prices drop and capacity gets larger, it would definitely be an option.

 

How bad is the stutter without the fix? I don't feal like going through all that and giong down to 32bit. would i notice it in game?

 

I'll be able to give you actual figures when I receive mine next week but yeah I would think you would definitely notice the improvement in game. The stutter can be reduced to about zero with a number of tweaks but the SteadyState fix I believe increases speed considerably.