How do you know when drive fails under RAID 1?

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Posted by hcmc, 04-19-2010, 10:37 AM
This probably sounds like a very stupid question to the pros here, but ... I have a Dell serer with RAID 1 mirrored drives for service continuity purposes, and have no idea what a drive failure looks like since it hasn't happened. Once a week I check the system log for errors (Windows 2003 server), and would notice anything that sounded like a drive failure. Less frequently, I check the device manager and if everything says "working properly" I go on to the next thing. As far as I can tell, there is no separate admin tool related to the RAID hardware or driver. What does a drive failure look like? Even more useful -- is there a way to get the system to notify me proactively if it happens? The server is getting old enough that it's worth worrying about.
Posted by PsyberMind, 04-19-2010, 10:57 AM
I'm not 100% about server, but I actually have a RAID1 on XP Pro SP2. Usually the Raid Controller software will nag at you, but as a last resort, When I last lost a disk, the Manger utility (Right Clock on My Computer, click Manage, disk manager) will report a redundancy failure, and give you the option to rebuild the array. If there is a bad block on any of the drives, the raid will stop rebuilding at that point.
Posted by quad3datwork, 04-19-2010, 11:56 AM
Like PsyberMind suggested. You need to know the brand/type/model of your HW RAID controller (probably can be found under deveice manager) and download additional utility from the vendor to monitor it. Windows *may* have the default drivers for it, however it won't monitor it.

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