I had someone ask me to benchmark my WD 2TB elements drive. It might be useful to someone else, this is running on USB 2.0.
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Month: August 2010
Hello, if you’ve read anything on my blog, you’ll note that I had a 6 x 1 TB HDD SATA raid going through my ICH9R ABIT IP35 motherboard. I recently decided to reformat the ‘server’, and was told by a few that I should be able to reformat the OS drive (separate from the array), and I would not have any issues. So ahead I went … reinstalled OS, got into windows for the first time, and noticed the array was bjorked.
The array had gone into a failed state, and decided to pull 1 drive out of the array as well. I tried removing the 1 drive, re-adding it as a spare, but it would not take/rebuild. I used about 14 different recovery software applications (get data back, undelete, raid recovery, ubuntu live disc, R-Studio, etc) , over the span of 4 days and I could only recover 1/6 items I lost. I was hosed, as a last resort, I decided to rebuild the array, EXACTLY how it was prior to losing the data.
What I did was delete the entire 6 disk array, and re-built the array as I had done before this fiasco. My steps are a little more technical, these are assuming you know how to set up your own raid. If you need any more help, you can comment and i’ll respond.
Step 1 ) Remove array, via option 3 in CTRL – I
Step 2 ) Recreate array with the exact same HDD’s as before
Step 3 ) Use the exact same options as before, raid 5, 64KB strip, etc
Step 4 ) boot into windows
Step 5 ) Go to Disk Management
Step 6 ) It will ask you to specify the GPT or MBR, select the option you previously chose
Step 7 ) Go through the options, but do NOT format the disk
Step 8 ) Use Getdataback, or some other NTFS recovery software
It took about 5 minutes for GetDataBack to show me my entire file structure, and recover ALL of my data back, 100%.
This is all assuming you have NOT done the following :
1) formatted your hdd
2) raid 5, with ICH9R controller – fakeraid
3) you did NOT write any data to your hdd’s
4) technically, this should work with 5 out of 6 HDD’s, or 2 out of 4, etc for a raid 5
I did not think this would work, but boy was I happy I tried it.
^_^
Categories
Riverbed ROCKS!
At my day job, I was tasked with choosing what direction we were to go with on WAN acceleration. The choice was either adding a second T1 line, Cisco WAAS, and Riverbed. For many, many reasons we chose Riverbed over WAAS, or simply adding a second T1. We’ve seen almost a 5x speed increase, now that we have had some good data being sent.
Took us less then 10 days to get 19 appliances deployed at all of our remote branches. We had users actually deploy them, after writing up a how-to (that’s how easy it is to deploy!) Each branch only has a single T1, and this is what our WAN usage looks like after 2-3 months of usage….lots of bandwidth saved :).
All we have left now, is to remove remote servers (print serving, dns, dhcp, etc), and centralize personal drives (these are still on location).
The traffic we’re seeing the biggest reductions on is CIFS, NOTES, Exchange, and our local sharepoint site.
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