Category: Category

RAID Recovery: The Data Knight Kroll Ontrack To The Rescue!

Tom’s Hardware goes into Ontrack and reports on the world of data recover. Lots of good information on data recovery and costs. Recovering data from “RAID systems can reach the five-digit zone rather quickly”, so it’s definitely worth investing in a good backup mechanism before disaster occurs.

Hard drive failure is especially disastrous for smaller companies working with a single server and a single disk, if they do not have a complete and working data backup at hand. The whole situation is even more complicated if the broken hard drive is a member of a RAID array. Neither hard drive failure in RAID 1 nor RAID 5 will result in data loss, since this scenario has been taken care of by the choice of these RAID levels in advance. But the risk of human error increases: self-made data loss occurs if you accidentally substitute the wrong drive in a degraded RAID 5 array (one with a failed hard drive).

Network-Attached Storage With FreeNAS

Howto Forge has a great howto for installing and configuring FreeNAS 0.68.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a network-attached storage server with FreeNAS. FreeNAS is based on the FreeBSD operating system and supports CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, RSYNC, SSH, local user authentication, and software RAID (0, 1, 5). It comes with a powerful web interface and uses very little space on the hard drive – about 32MB.

Build a Cheap and Fast RAID 5 NAS

SmallNetBuilder’s guide to building your own NAS device. In it they use a standard PC with an LSI Logic MegaRAID hardware-based RAID card. Included are step-by-step screenshots on setting up the RAID device using the MegaRAID’s bios, and benchmark of the machine while running Ubuntu Linux and FreeNAS.

Western Digital WD740ADFD: Bottled Lightning

AnandTech reviews the latest update to Western Digital’s 74 GB 10,000 RPM hard drive.

Over the course of the last couple of years, the 8MB cache drive has been enhanced with minor revisions with one of the latest versions, WD740GD-00FLC0, receiving tweaks that significantly improved its performance in single-user applications.

A look at the FreeNAS server

NewsForge reviews FreeNAS 0.66.

FreeNAS, an open source NAS server, can convert a PC into a network-attached storage server. The software, which is based on FreeBSD, Samba, and PHP, includes an operating system that supports various software RAID models and a Web user interface. The server supports access from Windows machines, Apple Macs, FTP, SSH, and Network File System (NFS), and it takes up less than 16MB of disk space on a hard drive or removable media.