A RAID 1 or RAID 5 array will avoid losing data when one of the N drives in the array fails.
But if a second drive fails, you lose your data. So it’s important to know when one of your RAID drives has a problem.
Windows NT, 2000, and XP (if you do this), plus server versions of Windows, support software RAID – no special RAID hardware needed, just drives visible to the OS. (It might work with Vista, too; I haven’t tried.)
But there’s no way for Windows to notify you when there’s a problem with one of the drives. (You really want to replace a failing drive before a second one goes bad!)
So I put together CheckRAID to solve this. (Click to download; it’s a 133 kB ZIP file). It’s freeware (public domain).
Unzip it into a folder (anywhere you please) and run CheckRAID.bat every so often to check for a failed (or unsynchronized) RAID drive. See the README.TXT inside for more details.
Enjoy. If you find this useful, I’d appreciate a comment.