Dead HDD and Sagetv

[Jesse]

Hi,

Maybe a dumb question. I am having sage record to three different hdd's at this time. If one of those drives were to fail would sage be able to determine this and send new recordings to the working hdd's? If one happened to be out of town for a few days when a drive failed this sort of thing could come in handy.

Anyone?

Jesse

[waltraud]

Hi,

I'd say that Windows will most likely hang anyway if you loose a drive while it's up and running. This probaly won't happen with USB or Firewire drives because they can be hotplugged. However I would still expect the application which is accessing the drive while it's being 'hotplugged' to crash or hang.

[Jesse]

Hi,

Interesting point.

What about if the drive is part of a raid array? Would windows still hang, or does the raid card handle this issue so that windows will continue to run?

Thoughts?

Jesse

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by waltraud

Hi,

I'd say that Windows will most likely hang anyway if you loose a drive while it's up and running. This probaly won't happen with USB or Firewire drives because they can be hotplugged. However I would still expect the application which is accessing the drive while it's being 'hotplugged' to crash or hang.

If it is a data drive, Windows won't hang, but it will start throwing event errors about the dead drive.

Originally Posted by Jesse

Hi,
What about if the drive is part of a raid array? Would windows still hang, or does the raid card handle this issue so that windows will continue to run?

The raid card handles it, that is the reason we go Raid and spend $$$. Windows doesn't even know how many drives are in the array, it just sees one drive. The raid card takes care of everything.

If a drive dies, the card will use the data from the rest of the drives to maintain the data. It will go inot to a reduced performance mode while doing so, but the data is kept valid. When that drive fails, the card wil let you know there is a problem, a buzzer goes off, an email sent, a print job sent, etc.

[Jesse]

Hi,

Well that seems like good news. If my os is installed on a raid 1 array then the system should remain up in the case of a data drive failure or a failure of one of the boot drives. So I am back to wondering if sage will just redirect any recordings taking place after the failure to one of the working drives.

Anyone know for sure?

Jesse

[gplasky]

Well I have a local drive and a network drive. If I take the network drive down for something (upgrade) Sage just records to the local drive. I haven't seen an error or a hiccup yet.

Gerry

[stevech]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Well I have a local drive and a network drive. If I take the network drive down for something (upgrade) Sage just records to the local drive. I haven't seen an error or a hiccup yet.

Gerry

of course, I presume, you take down the network drive only when Sage isn't writing a file.

[ke6guj]

Originally Posted by Jesse

Hi,

Well that seems like good news. If my os is installed on a raid 1 array then the system should remain up in the case of a data drive failure or a failure of one of the boot drives. So I am back to wondering if sage will just redirect any recordings taking place after the failure to one of the working drives.

Anyone know for sure?

Jesse

As long as only 1 of your drives in a hardware Raid array died, then the array would still be visible to Windows as a valid working drive. The array would be in a "degraded" low performance mode but would still be up. Sage would still record to it if it were the drive with the most free space.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by stevech

of course, I presume, you take down the network drive only when Sage isn't writing a file.

Well there was the time that I THOUGHT nothing was recording. By the time I brought it back up the recording was happening on the local drive. How do I know it didn't actually start there? The beginning started with a red section showing it couldn't start on time. That and the remnant of the recording left on the network drive which I promptly deleted. Wasn't sure what kind of havoc it would play with the recording and I didn' lose much. Less than 5 minutes.

Gerry

[jptaz]

I have to disagree about how SageTV and Windows handles a failing hard drive.

My buddy had one of his video drives start failing and the whole system became unresponsive and recordings started to get corrupted. Yes windows starts to log events and errors, but the system is very slow to respond as it gets tied up retrying disk reads and writes. I suspect a drive completely dying while it is running would basically make windows unusable or dead and SageTV definitely does not handle this nicely. In fact the whole system crashed several times as a result and the boot drive was not even the drive reporting errors...it still baffles me that Windows itself never implement SMART monitoring to give warnings. My buddies drives were running too hot which is probably why they failed.

That is why I paid the big bucks for the RAID 5 setup. I even tested running on a degraded RAID 5 Array while it was rebuilding...and SageTV worked fine...so goal achieved and I feel good about my investment.

John

[gplasky]

My case is a little different. It wasn't slowly dying, generating errors or such it was just there one moment and gone the next. No chance to generate errors. Honestly, I don't know a program around that can handle a dying drive gracefully. If a program is trying to write and some writes occur and some don't then just about any program is going to have difficulty running. SO if you need that 24 x7 access then definitely RAID is worth the expense. But also keep in mind that RAID is not a replacment for backups. Failures can occur anywhere (RAID included.) and when they do is the data worth enough to you to backup?

Gerry

[jptaz]

I agree 100% with you Gerry. I have no expectation for SageTV to protect me or handle a drive failure gracefully....I do think the OS should warn if the drive is failing better than it doesm but there are tools for that.

I backup all my critical files to an external hard drive at least once a week and I may change that soon with an automated job and do it daily.

My goal is to buy myself a day or two to replace the failing drive. So far I have only ever had one drive fail at a time, knock on wood, and RAID 5 protects me from that.

John

[jlowery7]

Well, if you've got $$$$ go for RAID 10. That's probably about as safe as you can get.