How to test a raid 1?

[cyberock]

I'm new to this whole raid thing. I bought a Asus P4P800 Deluxe mobo that had raid and have decided to do a raid 1 for my two 160 gig drives. I know, highly inefficient but I wanted to know my drives are mirrored. Is there a way I can test this out to make sure the raid is working properly. I just feel a little insecure in just trusting it.

 

[pcman83]

Ok this is a easy way to test it. Unplug one of the drives from the power and turn your pc on, if it boots up fine then there is no problem. Becuase all the hard drive is doing is copying the data. And do you really need that much data security? I would get a dvd burner and back up the most important stuff, becuase 160gb is a lot to loose.

 

[Matthias99]

Ideally you should try unplugging a drive while it's running and writing data, to make sure the real-time failover works. It doesn't help much if your RAID controller crashes when something actually goes wrong.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

One word.

Yoink!

Like mentioned, preferably while running and read/writing. Your system should be able to drop right back to single-drive mode ... while screaming like a banshee at you that your array's integrity is Critical.

Once that's finished, you can test the "hot rebuild" by dropping the drive back in and seeing if the drive controller starts the process on its own.

- M4H

 

[cyberock]

Thanks! I'll have to test that out tonight.

 

[MadAd]

phew, merc has the dope, just make sure you rebuild after you replace EACH drive - disconnecting one to test, then the other with no rebuuld inbetween could produce unwanted results