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Ed Bott's Microsoft Challenge--10/26/00

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by ebott

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I just experienced every Windows user's nightmare--a sudden, serious, data-destroying hard disk crash. Luckily, I was able to recover all my data from backup tapes, but I wonder whether I could have done a better job of anticipating this crisis before my disk began making horrible grinding sounds. How do you keep tabs on disk performance? Do you have a set of procedures and third-party tools you use to keep your disks running at peak efficiency? I have only two requirements: 1. Any tests must be able to run without requiring a reboot. 2. Any utilities must be fully compatible with Windows 2000.

15 replies

by m.a.s. matrix

just a little tip. when drives start making the 'grinding sound' and eventuly halt, you can put them in the freezer for about 30min and that will be long enough for the platters to shrink. this will allow them to spin freely on the spindle. this will allow you to ghost or move the information you need to another drive before it starts to heat up again.

(just in case this happens again)

by m.a.s. matrix

there is a good one. i use norton utilities 2000 which has all the same stuff and a little more. excellent utiliy. i would go with that too.

by mikel~t

I would recommend Norton System Works. I like the freezer idea though, so I'm gonna give that a try the next time one of my computers does that...but anyway...Norton System Works is great...you can run disk integrety checks daily, hourly, at startup, whenever you want to schedule it. It monitors every sort of aspect of your computer you can think off....it will defrag your hard drives automatically when a limit is reached...

I would check it out, and see what you think.

Mike

by ustutz

On a server that would be the job of the RAID controller, associated utilitites, and the server manufacturer's system monitoring utitlities. E.g., on HP Netserver we are talking nraid.exe for the former, and Measureware for the later. On Compaq Insight performs that functionality (limited exposure to that one). Third party, you products like CA Unicenter TNG. Key is (remote) notification of an 'event'.

by mike kurkowski

This doesn't meet all of your requirements. :-)
However it is clear that to correctly test a disk the IDE controller, disk access system, and other considerations of the OS accessing the disk through it's interface have to be considered.
Thereforethere is unlikely to be a "no re-boot" utility that does a through, deep, test for disk integrity, as it must have it's own disk access system at a low level to eliminate the unknown factors.
Visit www.grc.com and take a look at Spinrite5. It does a very through test of disk integrity. (also has some very interesting reading on the Price VS Reliability concept in the http://grc.com/sroverview.htm)
Best regards,
Mike...

by stevel

At our company we use a variety of tools to keep track of disk reliability as well as many other performance issues. First of all all our systems (Primarily COMPAQ servers) use hot swappable RAID so in the event of a drive failure you simply yank it and stuff another in and the controller rebuilds it automatically. All of our equipment is SNMP compatible so we can monitor it using a variety of software, we use Compaq's Insight Manager as well as OnePoint (Formerly Sentry) to monitor a number of important things from drive performance to processor usage and temperature. This allows us to predict failures in many cases.

by stevel

Another thing that helps us is that all our Compaq drives are SMART capable. While this doesn't always predict failures, it will send a trap to our monitoring software when it feels a failure is possible in the near future. In our Insight manager and One Point software this pops up as a little yellow flag suggesting that we replace the drive before failure. This has been most helpful to us as we maintain over 1000 servers, many of them SQL servers with 18+ drives. Many new hard drives both SCSI and IDE support this feature. In most cases you can turn on SMART in your BIOS and it will automatically pick up those drives in your system that support it.

by nino_11

To avoid this kind of incidents on an NT environment punching a software called diskeeper 5.0 compatible (on win95/98/NT/2000) this software enables you to perform scheduled defragmentation on all workstations connected to an NT server. It basicallyprevents fragmentation?.the best part is you can ?set it and forget ? for monitoring reports can also be generated per job.

On anticipating or saving files I usually create a home directory for all users connected to the server to automatically default the save option to the server?it would be their discretion to save else ware?.the issue a memo stating any MIS wont be liable no any form of documentation not saved on the server.

I don?t really know if I addressed the question?.but likewhat I usually say no harm in trying ?

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