Strangely, Hard Disk Sentinel only reported the logical drive and not the individual disks. The issue appeared after creating an array from a new set of drives. The system is now running flawlessly and I finally have the ability to prevent problems instead of reacting to them.Īdditionally, the Surface Test feature allowed me to go through my box of "discard" drives, easily determining which ones were riddled with bad sectors and amazingly recovering many to be repurposed for cold storage.Īs for support, Hard Disk Sentinel owner and developer Janos far exceeded my expectations by personally troubleshooting an issue and creating a patch in rapid succession. Oh, and the almost discarded "failed drive" was the key to saving an array without a recent backup.
I replaced all SFF cables, reset the error values, RMA'ed the bad sector drive, replaced the NVMe heatsink/fan, and corrected the bay fan speeds. And while I was checking temperatures, I found two fans in the array were running at half speed causing the drives in those bays to run hotter. Further, I was able to identify the cause of an intermittent NMVe performance issue it was throttling due overheating. In the process, it revealed an assumed healthy drive in another array had multiple bad sectors. Inspection of other drives also showed this was systemic. Then it showed the drive I was about to discard was not failing, but had a cabling issue. What I found was nothing short of amazing.įirst, I was shocked (and delighted) that it could natively identify and report information about the drives behind my RAID controller, something I'd only seen in OEM software. I discovered Hard Disk Sentinel while searching for software to test yet another failed drive. Unexpectedly, my IT skills have been a crucial to success in this highly technical field, specifically maintaining and growing this storage system. I'm a creative producer, but was previously a certified, enterprise-level, systems, network, and SAN administrator for over two decades, managing Dell, HP, Oracle, & Cisco hardware.
I have a self-built and administered custom storage solution with ~300TB across 50 drives (and growing). It's literally saved me thousands of dollars through recovered drives and time I would have spent rebuilding arrays and data rescue.Īs a small, self-employed, Orlando-based video production company with big clients like Disney, having reliable storage is critical to my business.
It features maintenance and monitoring capabilities I've only seen in enterprise OEM solutions, supporting all types of hard disks, a vast number of controllers, all within a single application. If you have a hard disk, you need Hard Disk Sentinel. Use case of Hard Disk Sentinel in 2023 Written by Tony Leps
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