A couple of years ago I posted my “CheckRAID.bat” routine for detecting problems with a Windows software RAID.
I’ve done a new version. This one works not only with Windows software RAID arrays, but also with NVIDIA motherboard supported RAIDs. And this one emails you a report automatically.
RAIDs are great for backup; a RAID 1 or RAID 5 array will preserve your data intact even if one of the drives in the array fails. But if two or more drives fail, you lose your data. So it’s important to know when you have a failed/failing drive, so you can replace it before a second drive fails.
Unfortunately neither Microsoft nor NVIDIA provide any way to know when this is happening, other than manually looking in the system log files, or (in NVIDIA’s case) manually running their “NVIDIA Control Panel” app to check the health of the array.
So I cooked up a little Python routine that checks the system logs automatically, and emails a report.
I call this version CheckRAID2; click the name to download it as a ZIP file (about 15 MBytes; almost all of that is the Python installer). It’s freeware (public domain).
Unzip it into a folder (anywhere you please, but you’ll need to keep the folder around, so put it where you don’t mind it) and follow the instructions in the README.txt file to set it up. You’ll need to install Python if you don’t already have it on your system – the download includes the Python installer (Python is free).
As far as I know, this is the only automated RAID status check that supports NVIDIA’s motherboard-driven RAID arrays.
If you find this useful, I’d appreciate a comment.