SoftRAID Saves the Day
MPG has long recommended SoftRAID not just for RAID, but for general usage anytime automation of drive health is warranted (which is to say, most of the time.
See also Even ”Enterprise Grade” Drives Fail.
This SoftRAID user story is worth reading, because it points out grievous user errors—but SoftRAID saved the day.
Specifically in this case, hardware goes bad or just wears out over time. While a car might start making noises or fail to start, computers tend to fail catastrophically (in terms of data loss).
Fast forward to July 9, 2017: three and a half years after initial setup, SoftRAID 4 popped up a dialog box, saying: “Disk predicted to fail” even though the system appeared to be running fine.
Futureproof President Phil Legg was concerned. He was advised by SoftRAID’s online help to generate a technical support file and send it to SoftRAID tech support. When he launched SoftRAID to create the file, he discovered that one of the disks had a “Failure Predicted” alert -- a much more critical issue. Disk sectors were being reallocated at an alarming rate. Legg immediately emailed SoftRAID for a solution.
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