NVidia NVRAID review

NVidia NVRaid review: It is a consumer-level piece of junk!

There are no SMART functionality whatsoever, and no indication of which HD failed.

There is no way to tell which HD failed.

Initialization / Setup / Maintenance / Recovery procedure is extremely complicated. Unless the reader prints articles from my website about NVRAID for when HD crashes, the reader will be lost when the breakdown happens about what to do.

Computers: every time I am in a hurry, they crash. Never do something when late to go somewhere or do something. As a Murphy's Law, computer will crash right when you are in a hurry to finish something.

You must buy a 3rd HD and keep it for when one of the hard drives crashes.

Instead of NVRAID consumer-level piece of junk, invest money into reliability, and buy hardware-based RAID card with SMART alert, bad HD / failed indication, hot swap, and hardware-based rebuild. However, cards such as these may cost hundreds of dollars. You may be better off buying a motherboard or a complete server hardware with build-in hardware RAID.

 

As an example, here is the guessing game you are required to play when (not if) the NVidia NVRAID array crashes, without telling you any specifics about the error, and about the particular HD affected:

Before rebuilding: disconnect one HD. Try to boot Windows. Does it say that system shut down unexpectedly? (Without a long surface scan and SMART scan, this quick and dirty cheat may indicate that this is the one which dropped out).

Enable chkdsk on boot, reboot with the one HD and repair it.

Then, do a full surface repair scan (this will take a long time). 250GB HD should be left to run overnight. Also remember that unless you have WinTee, and / or unless the scan disk is working on a bootable Windows partition, there is no way to ensure that the scan log gets saved to hard drive for a later review by you. If the scan disc program crashes, or the computer crashes during scan, there may not be a way for you to know exactly what and when during the scan it happened.

Do the same for other of the two failed hard drives (in the array).

If both can boot w/o errors, then you can use either one as master (since without SMART / bad sector scan, you don't know which one is unhealthy).

Which one will boot if array drops: random, or which ever was set with "boot=yes". This may be the unhealthy one!



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Page last modified 05-Feb-17 20:41:27 EST
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