Recent content by CiPHER

To be honest, drive failure rate shouldn't be a big issue if you got everything properly arranged for. I always asserted that you should have any harddrive able to fail at any moment, without you having a bad day. It that's true, then you have properly configured your storage setup I think. But...

Never run SMART 'tests'. They aren't any good and actually destroy evidence. SMART is all about the attributes. People want to push a button and then say 'DRIVE FAILED!!!' or 'DRIVE GOOD!!'. But it does not work that way. SMART has to interpreted. Most applications which automate this, do a bad...

WD or Hitachi sounds like good choices to me. But any drive can fail after a month or so. No guarantees here. Most harddrives now have very limited warranty as well, as opposed to the past where 5 years or even 10 years was pretty common. Those golden days are behind us; the market for...

First read the SMART data before doing anything else. Try CrystalDiskInfo and post a screenshot here with all attributes being visible. In particular, Current Pending Sector (Bad sectors) and UDMA CRC Error Count (Cabling errors) are important.

You can use the same system by using a Linux USB-stick, for example Ubuntu. After having booted, Ubuntu will see the physical drives that you have connected to the chipset SATA instead of the RAID controller. Then you can copy the contents off of it. Then you can connect the new disks to the...

If you make a 1:1 clone of the drives and insert it in the backup 'cold' system, it should pickup the RAID metadata and all should work. Making the 1:1 clone is best achieved using a non-Windows OS (Linux/BSD) and using a raw cloning application such as simple 'dd' - part of any UNIX-like...

Harddrives are proven devices. They are much simpler than SSDs which have like their own operating system. This is good for several things, but also makes it prone to obscure bugs. Harddrives thus are good for conservative users who want reliability and compatibility. The 15k ones still do...

Show us the SMART data if possible. CrystalDiskInfo is a Windows application that can read SMART data. ddrescue is the best suggestion really, if you are serious about the data. Right now, you already used chkdsk so a lot of damage to your files is likely to have happened already. This cannot...

Some games utilise more RAM. For example, Master of Orion can actually use more than 16GB of RAM. Only 64-bit games can do this. Regular 32-bit games are limited to 2GiB RAM or 3GiB when specially compiled. Not that many games are 64-bit.

You should be aware that consumer-grade Samsung SSDs are unsuitable for anything other than standalone desktop usage, meaning no RAID or other form of complex storage. Samsung SSDs use PoR recovery mechanism that allows the SSD to go back in time after unexpected power loss. Other SSDs use...

Well, a bad sector first has be known. If a sector is 'bad' but the harddrive does not know it - meaning it never failed a READ request - then overwriting that sector would not uncover the issue. Even worse, it would destroy any evidence of there ever been a bad sector. If a bad sector is...

You can try Areca. But i find it a waste to use Hardware RAID at all, especially for RAID1. In general software RAID is superior for a number of reasons, particularly Linux has good software RAID (md-raid). Beware that many hardware RAID controllers require TLER-enabled harddrives, or the...

UEFI has dedicated boot partitions, whereas MBR means the first sector is the boot sector and there the boot code has to do everything. UEFI is more standardised and allows for more complex bootcode to be easily maintained. You CAN boot from GPT partitions without UEFI, just Windows is not able...

I don't really see the point of formatting a new harddrive. If the purpose is to find disks that die rapidly, then you should read not write since things like bad sectors will not get detected upon writing. The only real valid point to format a harddrive is when using LUKS or other form of...

I think this interpretation is wrong, for the following reason: Having a lot of memory is not because your applications might be needing that much memory.... it is because of file cache. I would assert that your applications should be using 10 - 25% of your memory tops. The other 75%+ should...