Failed V drive

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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 was a 1 TB drive made up of two 500 GB drives to create a striped volume. One of the drives seems to have completely 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. Restoring the files to the new drive took a few hours, but I lost nothing at all.

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.