How to monitor for offline drive (lost power)?

[geogherkins]

Question: Can HD Sentinel alert when a HDD goes "offline" and is gone?

I have HD Sentinel Standard running on Windows Home Server 2011 (same as Windows Server 2008 R2). It detects all HDD correctly through the on-board Intel SATA RAID controller. I have both a RAID1 set of 2 drives (system volume) and another RAID5 set of 4 drives (data volume).

Recently suffered a loss of power or SATA connection. Not sure which - two drives in the RAID5 array were "missing" and the RAID5 array was broken. (Discovered this by restarting computer and RAID controller was not detecting 2 of the 6 drives). Obviously, I can afford the failure of a single drive in a RAID5 array, but not two! So luck was on my side and by reseating all cables (power and SATA) I was able to recover my volume without loss of data.

But this event makes we desire a better alerting mechanism so I only lose one drive at a time and can recover easily. Can HD Sentinel alert when a HDD goes "offline" and is gone?

I realize there are some HDD which are normal to be gone - USB attached, for example. I think it would be a fair trade off to receive an alert from HD Sentinel whenever a USB drive is removed for the benefit of getting an alert if a SATA drive is unexpectedly "removed".

Thank you.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for the information and the tip!

I can confirm that currently only Hard Disk Sentinel Enterprise version has this function: to monitor the removal (and arrival) of hard disks and other storage devices and both log these events and send alert (if configured) upon these events.
(see the first image on http://www.hdsentinel.com/hard_disk_sen ... creenshots as in the bottom section it shows these events in the log).

It is possible that a such feature will be available in other editions of Hard Disk Sentinel as I agree that it would be nice to be alerted when drive(s) are missing. Exactly as you wrote, it is required to specify which drive(s) should trigger such alerts as it may not be required to monitor all drives (for example removable USB drives).

Ps. not sure if helpful, but if you prefer, you can re-load the status of offline disk(s) to check their last status by using File -> Open status of offline disks.
This way the last known status (and statistics, trends, etc...) of the hard disk can be re-loaded even if it is not connected.

[geogherkins]

Thank you for the reply. I understand your need to up-sell additional "features" in the professional or enterprise editions, but it would be nice to have this available in the "standard" edition as well. Not being a business customer, I only have a single computer I wish to monitor, so the "enterprise" licensing model does not fit well.

[hdsentinel]

Yes, I completely agree: the Enterprise version is designed to manage computers in a network, so for a single computer it may not be the best option.
Thanks for the tip, it is possible that such alert will be available in the smaller editions ("standard" and "Pro") as well.

[geogherkins]

Looking forward to the next maintenance cycle and an update where the "standard" edition can detect missing drives and assist in dealing with failing RAID groups.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks!
To be honest, it may not be available in the next version, but will be surely added in a future version.

[i3v]

For the future myself (just because I forgot where is this option once again ).
The "Configuration->Alerts->When disk removed/disconnected" option in Hard Disk Sentinel 6.20 (Pro) is clickable. The dialog you get allows to specify the disks to trigger this alert.

2024-10-16 16_13_40-Configuration - Hard Disk Sentinel 6.20 PRO.png (34.91 KiB) Viewed 752 times

A great option to have!