Difference between revisions of "Failed V drive"

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(Why we do backups!)
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==Why we do backups!==
 
==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.
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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
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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.
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I ended up replacing the bad drive with a 1 TB SATA drive that was just as fast as the old striped drive, so I ended up with a spare 500 GB drive.
  
 
==Don't need to do striped volume anymore==
 
==Don't need to do striped volume anymore==

Revision as of 16:19, 30 July 2011

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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 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.

I ended up replacing the bad drive with a 1 TB SATA drive that was just as fast as the old striped drive, so I ended up with a spare 500 GB drive.

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.