A couple of nights ago, I was trying to add a couple of hard drives to my computer for expanded data storage. While this is theoretically supported by the hardware, I got a blue screen of death from Windows 7 in the midst of the drive initialization (something to do with "driver power", which leads me to believe that 600W is insufficient power for four drives in this machine) and had to reboot.
When I did, I discovered that disk 0 in my first volume set (the boot drive) was showing SMART ERROR(0) whereas disk 1 (the mirror of the boot drive) was showing that it was in good health. So I figured I'd go ahead and let it boot and rebuild.
Er. Sure. That didn't work. Yeah, it reinitialized and theoretically rebuilt disk 0, but the machine was running like a pig and the drive activity light was solid ON. So I managed to get it to shut down cleanly, pulled disk 0 (I had already pulled the second volume set the night of the crash, because it was showing errors as well), and rebooted with disk 1 only. Ah. Success!
So now I have a rush order in with Amazon for a new drive to replace disk 0 (they have to be identical drives and these are two years old, so I was lucky to find a few still in stock) and a spare for the eventuality that disk 1 will eventually quit on me.
The wonder of this is that, many years ago, and under Windows NT 4 I think, I had a disk crash like this and lost about 30 days worth of data, that being the period since I'd last backed stuff up. In those days, of course, backups were to tape or to floppy disk, or maybe to a ZIP drive, so I didn't have a real backup plan. And in those days, the only way you got reliable RAID was with expensive SCSI drives and equipment.
So the ability to mirror inexpensive SATA drives in RAID 1 has been quite the blessing for the past five or six years, and proved itself the other night. While I do have a full system backup from Sunday night, I really didn't want to have to use it.
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