I have created a Software Raid using the yast2 GUI on SUSE ES 10/11. The raid works great and it's a raid 5. I have 5 Drives they are cheap 2GB Cases that have 2 - 1TB Drives in each case (Serial ATA Drives) and I connect them in via Esata to the motherboard. The problem I have as this is "cheap" storage when of the the 5 drives goes out on the RAID I seem to have no logs of any issues and it get's harder and harder to write to it until it dies. I use SAMBA to mount the 4TB parition to my PC's in my home on a GIG network. My question is this, are there any good (Free) tools in Linux to monitor a raid or the drives on the raid to detect any problems??? I haven't found any yet and was just wondering if some exist.
2 Answers
You should be using mdadm
to create software RAID in Linux (it's probably what YAST is using internally) - the man
page includes this gem:
Running
mdadm --monitor --scan -1
from a cron script will ensure regular notification of any degraded arrays.
I use the following (-1
is the short version of --oneshot
):
$ cat /etc/cron.hourly/mdadm
#! /bin/sh
set -e
mdadm --monitor --scan --oneshot
Install postfix, set your email address as an alias from root in /etc/aliases
, run newaliases
to update the database, and expect hourly email if anything breaks.