My First RAID

3Ware 8000 Series RAID controller card




Hmmmm. How long is this going to take?

1 terabyte = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes
 2TB =
Time = 30.54198966 Hours

~20000kB/s

Press Ctrl-C to interrupt

Initial status (read from logfile)

rescued:         0 B,  errsize:       0 B,  errors:       0
Current status

rescued:     1089GB    errsize:       0 B  current rate: 11796 kB/s

   ipos:     1089GB    errsize:       0 B  Averige rate: 19.550kB/s

   opos:     1089GB  time from last successful read: 0s

Trying non-tried blocks...

Aquiring more hardware

Tuesday I was at The Hackery again to shoot the shit with Pentium before stopping in at FreeGeek to get more SATA power connectors. The FG Store wouldn't break a $20 for a $2 item so I grabed a set of computer speakers to temporarily replace my JVC RX-6000V with the gremlins in it. Back to NCIX today to purchase my third WD20EARS 2TB drive
NCIX
WD20EARS  $111.99 CAD

FreeGeek
Duel SATA power adapter and Panasonic RP SP-1000 computer speakers $10.00 CAD

Aquiring Hardware

Monday my lover was kind enough to drive me over to NCIX for to purchase another WD20EARS 2TB Hard Drive.

Issues: I'm out of SATA ports on my MOBO and SATA power connectors on my two older 250 Watt power supplies.  Best Buy replaced the power adapter for my wife's Toshiba laptop with a clunky universal type she dislikes, and I need to get that new drive powered up and copy over all my data.

Tuesday I stopped off at The Hackery to see if David might have a power adapter for my wife's Toshiba laptop, which he did, and he also had a used 32bit PCI RAID card.  Excellent!  Now I can build a redundant hardware RAID and put this isue to rest.

NCIXWD20EARS  $111.99 CAD.

The Hackery3Ware 8000 series 32Bit PCI RAID card and a SATA Ppower adapter  20.00 CAD

After returning home and installing all the new hardware, It was late and I chose to spend most of my time with my partner watching lost and scrubs amungst other less g rated activities. After a few days spending a few hours at it spread over the next dew days I ran into a wall while setting up the raid card as I only had 2 drives and I didn't want to take a chance hooking my original drive with all my data up to a RAID card that might newk it by mistake rather than migrate the data to both drives.  I need another drive.

SMART

It's been 3 weeks since I received a message on startup warning me that a problem was encountered reading from /dev/sdc and that it may indicate the drive may fail. Shit, I have 1.2TB of data on there and only 600GB of it (the irreplaceable data) is backed up on my 1GB drive, while the rest of it is vulnerable.

Hard Drive Monitoring and testing under Linux


sudo apt-get install smartmontools

2TB

Having reached nearly 80% capacity on my 1TB Samsung 103UJ last September I decided it was time to purchase a new drive.

NCIX, Anitec
A quick search of my favorite local computer retailers told be that the WD green series 2TB drives offered the bast value when comparing price per megabyte; however, this product line was also odd in that the manufacturer deliberately withheld publication of drive RPM and greenwashed the ad campaign. Despite their chicanery though I found several references to it running at 5900r/min. Although I feel strongly that disingenuous machination should not be rewarded, in the end this drive is well suited to meet my criteria.