RAID-1
April 3rd, 2008 by PotatoI have not mentioned recently how much I love having RAID-1 arrays on my work computers. One of the drives recently died, and aside from not using the computer for a few hours today while we waited for the Dell tech to come, there was no stress* and no downtime. All the data was safe on the mirrored drive, the new drive is in place and we are off to the races again. It took a while for me to figure out where in Windows I had to go to rebuild the array (it was the Intel Matrix Storage Manager program and not actually part of the control panel at all), and when I did I found that it was automatically rebuilding the array (though it was nice to see the status of that — looks like it will take about 2 hours to rebuild the 150 GB array). We still have to (and should be doing so more religiously) back up our data in case someone steals the whole computer, but this disaster-recovery is so easy that I’m considering picking up a second hard drive to get a RAID-1 array running at home, too :)
* – there is actually some stress related to a weird bug we were getting in our analysis software. We were getting different results running the same analysis a few times in a row, and it seemed to depend on the memory state of the computer. As we’re trouble shooting that bug, it seems to have gone away around the same time one drive died and we were left working off a single physical drive. We’re now wondering if that was a result of one of the drives in the array in the midst of failing, and the use of virtual memory… I’ll be testing some more later tonight after the array is back up and running 100%.