WHS: Drive failed. What did I lose? Duplication?

[kevine]

I had a drive fail last night in my WHS. I duplicate all the really important things like photos, home videos, etc. However, I do not duplicate DVD rips or TV programs. I know there are TV programs and DVDs missing from this 500GB drive but how do I find out what got lost? I was hoping the entries would stay in the wiz.bin file but everything in Sage seems to play fine.

On a side note, anybody else use duplication on TV programs? How does it work? Any ill side affects? I am just jittery about the wear and tear on the drives because I do a lot of TV recording. (20-30 programs/day) This is my second drive lost in less than 6 months and I have 2 identical more just like it. I don't want to have to go through this again. I know that I could setup raid to avoid this but that would mean identical drives and not all of mine are.

[ohpleaseno]

You lost any unduplicated files housed on that individual drive. There is no way of telling what was on that drive, so it will be an adventure of magical discovery from here on out.

[gplasky]

Anything duplicated are on multiple drives so all of those will be in your system. IF there were non-duplicated files on that drive those are the ones that would be lost. Now there is a chance that the drive held all duplicated files. Make sure to use the Remove a drive wizard when replacing the drive. If you duplicate TV Recordings it should just write the recording to a different drive once. As long as you are not making changes to the file that is all it will do. It will copy it to a different physical drive. It is not really different from having a raid setup that writes the file to 2 seperate drives. (or across multiple drives)

Gerry

[kevine]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Anything duplicated are on multiple drives so all of those will be in your system. IF there were non-duplicated files on that drive those are the ones that would be lost. Now there is a chance that the drive held all duplicated files. Make sure to use the Remove a drive wizard when replacing the drive. If you duplicate TV Recordings it should just write the recording to a different drive once. As long as you are not making changes to the file that is all it will do. It will copy it to a different physical drive. It is not really different from having a raid setup that writes the file to 2 seperate drives. (or across multiple drives)

Gerry

Just so we are clear, the drive died while in the pool. I cannot access it at all. You hear the tick sound from the drive. So, I had to remove it from the pool without removing everything from it.

Do you have your Sage recording directory duplicated? If you do, how is it working for you? Do you see any performance issues?

[gplasky]

I do NOT duplicate my TV recordings. We usually watch and delete the shows shortly after. If I lost or missed a show there are alternate ways of getting it. I'm running as little as possible on WHS. Comskip and Playon runs on another PC. I did see some performane issues with duplicated files and demigrator running on WHS. I don't duplicate folders because my files (music, photos, etc) exist on other PCs and is backed up by WHS. I just sync them to WHS for Sage to access them.

Gerry

[sic0048]

I don't duplicate my TV recordings either. Mainly because the shows are not that important, and space is an issue. Yes drives are cheap, but I would still need another 1-2tb of space just for duplication of those files. For me, it's not worth the $100-200 cost to do it at this point.

[ohpleaseno]

I don't duplicate because I really don't care if I lose it. I can always get it some other way if it is totally necessary.

[stevech]

To keep the WAF high, I have a pair of 500GB drives in RAID-1 (motherboard RAID). I don't want to apologize for losing the big cache of unwatched programs she has, nor her collection of reference shows from PBS cooking, Food TV and HGTV. The really important classics we have, such as repeat-favorites and perennial holiday shows, are on yet another backup.

Makes sense to me since drives are cheap.
IMO, pooling, JBOD, and dupe file after recording is imprudent versus RAID, due the time/load it takes to dupe. I now RAID drives may not move to a different disk controller, but the mobo is ASUS with Nvidia RAID, pretty generic. I don't know if there would be an issue - never tried.

Those 500GB disks have been running for about 18 months so far.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by kevine

Just so we are clear, the drive died while in the pool. I cannot access it at all. You hear the tick sound from the drive.

Tried the freeze-it fix yet? Sometimes, getting the drive down to 0F or so in the freezer, then quickly mounting it can get it to work if it won't spin-up due to stuck bearings.

[kevine]

Originally Posted by stevech

Tried the freeze-it fix yet? Sometimes, getting the drive down to 0F or so in the freezer, then quickly mounting it can get it to work if it won't spin-up due to stuck bearings.

No but now I can try that on 2 drives. Thanks for the tip.

I'll let you know if it works.

[kevine]

Originally Posted by stevech

To keep the WAF high, I have a pair of 500GB drives in RAID-1 (motherboard RAID). I don't want to apologize for losing the big cache of unwatched programs she has, nor her collection of reference shows from PBS cooking, Food TV and HGTV. The really important classics we have, such as repeat-favorites and perennial holiday shows, are on yet another backup.

Makes sense to me since drives are cheap.
IMO, pooling, JBOD, and dupe file after recording is imprudent versus RAID, due the time/load it takes to dupe. I now RAID drives may not move to a different disk controller, but the mobo is ASUS with Nvidia RAID, pretty generic. I don't know if there would be an issue - never tried.

Those 500GB disks have been running for about 18 months so far.

I was thinking about this myself. Is the RAID part of your pool or just your recording drive? Just so you are aware, in my investigating this issue. Hardware RAID volumes are not supported by Microsoft in WHS.

[stevech]

Originally Posted by kevine

I was thinking about this myself. Is the RAID part of your pool or just your recording drive? Just so you are aware, in my investigating this issue. Hardware RAID volumes are not supported by Microsoft in WHS.

I don't use WHS - just XP Pro on a garage-PC that runs Sage and home automation and web server. The RAID1 500GB pair have a C: boot partition for windows and a V: partition at 64K blocks for videos. That PC also has some other drives used for backup files (such as wiz.bin) and backup drive images of other PCs, using TruImage and SecondCopy. I think this is more reliable than pooling/JBOD. On my other PCs in the home, I do disk cloning (not drive imaging) to a hot-standby 2nd disk. Three times now, I did a 5 minute recovery from a virus/malware infestation by simply booting the clone and copying over the files that SecondCopy had archived since the last clone. Much simpler than reinstall OS and Apps and much easier than using an image rather than a clone. Having a hot standby is now viable due to cheap disk prices.

On the topic of WHS not supporting simple hardware RAID1: I hope I'm not mistaken to say that hardware RAID is transparent to the operating system. A write to disk goes to a driver that, down in the BIOS, splits that into two concurrent writes, unbeknownst to the operating system.