A8N-SLI SATA SMART monitoring

  • Thread starter Thread starter Leadfoot
  • Start date Start date
L

Leadfoot

haven't been able to find a SMART monitor that can monitor hard drives on
either the nVidia or SI3114 raid ports

Anyone know of one that works?
 
Leadfoot, I don't know of anything like that. This is why I bought a NetCell
card. I run what amounts to being RAID-3 (it's called RAID-XL by NetCell)
with three 160GB Seagate SATA drives, giving me a fast 320GB with full
hot-swap redundancy. The software monitors the health of each physical
drive at a user-set polling period (1-3600 seconds). About a month ago, it
appears that a SATA cable to one of my three drives worked loose. The
monitoring software warned me (via email at work) that one of the drives had
"failed", and meanwhile the rig continued to run flawlessly with what was
effectively a RAID-0 configuration of the 2 remaining "healthy" drives.
When I got home, I simply reseated all of the SATA cables, called up the
NetCell application, noticed that all three drives were now classified as
"healthy" with the previously reported "failed" one "off-line", and did a
hot rebuild of that third drive. It took about 9 hours to rebuild the third
drive, but I had full use of my rig all the while the rebuild went on in the
background. Throughout the whole episode, I only shut-down/booted-up once to
safely reseat the SATA cables.
 
Leadfoot, I don't know of anything like that. This is why I bought a NetCell
card. I run what amounts to being RAID-3 (it's called RAID-XL by NetCell)
with three 160GB Seagate SATA drives, giving me a fast 320GB with full
hot-swap redundancy. The software monitors the health of each physical
drive at a user-set polling period (1-3600 seconds). About a month ago, it
appears that a SATA cable to one of my three drives worked loose. The
monitoring software warned me (via email at work) that one of the drives had
"failed", and meanwhile the rig continued to run flawlessly with what was
effectively a RAID-0 configuration of the 2 remaining "healthy" drives.
When I got home, I simply reseated all of the SATA cables, called up the
NetCell application, noticed that all three drives were now classified as
"healthy" with the previously reported "failed" one "off-line", and did a
hot rebuild of that third drive. It took about 9 hours to rebuild the third
drive, but I had full use of my rig all the while the rebuild went on in the
background. Throughout the whole episode, I only shut-down/booted-up once to
safely reseat the SATA cables.
Click to expand...

This concept of RAID-3 is a marvelous idea. After all the nasty
things I've written about RAID in desktops in this and other forums,
it just might get me back to considering it again. I'd read about the
NetCell card in one of the computer magazines recently, but yours is
the first user experience I've run across. I'm glad it's working so
well for you!!

Ron
 
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