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 into 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 is probably bad, and I will need to replace it. I will make sure the SATA channel is working before I do this, but it is probably the drive. Because I have a backup plan and backups are 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 I needed the speed. 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, and I should be able to replace the striped volume with a single SATA drive and restore from backups.
Restore Complete
I replaced the bad drive with a new 1 terabyte Seagate SATA drive
- 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.
