Failed V drive
4/7/2011
Why we do backups!
In a classic case for robust backups, I went to check out some pictures from three years ago, and my V: drive was gone. This is a 1 TB drive made up of two 500 GB drives to create a striped volume. One of the drives seems to have failed. Opening up the box and wiggling all of the connections made no difference, so the drive was likely bad, and I needed to replace it. I made sure the SATA channel was working before buying a new drive. Because I had a backup plan and backups were happening several times a day via CrashPlan, I have a local backup set on an external drive plus a remote set at CrashPlan's data center, and did not lose anything. Had I not had this backup set, I would have lost thousands of pictures and videos dating back over quite a few years, including all of the time I spent editing them.
Don't need to do striped volume anymore
I did the striped volume originally because it was the only way at the time to get the speed I needed. That was back when I had two 80GB ATA drives in the set. I upgraded that to two 500GB SATA drives on my old P4 machine, which did not run SATA at full speed. With the current computer, SATA is plenty fast, so I replaced the striped volume with a single 1 terabyte Seagate SATA drive and restored from backups.
- Serial Number: 6VPBM41Y
- Model Number: ST310005N1A1AS-RK
I made this drive the V: drive to replace the original striped drive. The remaining half of the striped drive became drive W:. Restore from my local Crashplan backup sets was straightforward once I figured out how to set the restore to go to the original location instead of the desktop.
