The Culprit: Broken 80GB Wester Digital DriveThree to four weeks ago, I got the shock of my life. I turned on my main Photoshop Computer that also holds all of my photographs in form of undeveloped RAW files. Suddenly my computer reported that it could not find any hard drive to boot from and it made loud clicking noises. One of my drives was trying to spin up but could not. It sounded very much like a head crash.

The next day was pure agony for me, when I had to wait to dissect my computer. Although used to back up everything to external drives, I had become lazy recently. My most recent backup was already several months old. I took my internal hard drive to usb adapter and hooked up my main picture drive to my computer. The adapter works with Laptop and Desktop drives as well as the new SATA drives.

Fortunately, I was able to connect to the picture drive. I immediately copied the drive image to another drive of the same size with my laptop before I started checking the other two drives. I found that my small 80GB drive that held the boot record was completely dead. This drive also held many processed jpeg images, but nothing I could not recover from the RAW files. It took me two weeks of experimentation, trying to get the MBR moved to another drive before I finally gave up trying to restore my current installation. I was concerned about my software licenses but I got unexpected help from a friend.

After this disaster, I realized that I would never be as diligent with my backups as I needed to be and that I would need a raid solution. A raid level 1 takes two hard drives and combines them like a single hard drive, writing all data twice. Even if one drive went bad, I would still have another good one. When I build my computer a while ago, I based it on a Asus M2NPV-VM motherboard, since it supported a lot of RAM, had two IDE connectors, a whole lot of SATA connectors and decent on board graphics with DVI out. Fortunately, the board also has an NVIDIA nForce 430 southbridge that supports raid.

After building and setting up the raid array, I tried to install Windows XP. Based on the DOS of the 1980ies, I should not have been surprised that Windows demanded additional drives to be on a Floppy. Since Windows also does not have drivers for the nForce, I had to learn how to build my own Windows installation CD, since it refused to install from any other location.

I found a good tutorial online that I used when I built my first Windows CD with added drivers.  I took the official Nvidea drivers from their website, supposedly WHQL signed. Windows would now install correctly, but at the end of the installation, Windows was locked up in an infinite reboot loop. I was surprised, since the correct drivers should not have resulted in a reboot loop. After I built a new CD with the drivers from Siemens, omitting the sata_ide drivers, I finally got windows installed correctly.

Nvidia Mediashield showing both hard drives and the raid mode (mirroring)

Most problems came from the fact that I wanted to boot from the raid array to avoid the exact same problem I had before. I could not afford to lose any licenses or even the weeks to restore everything.

I installed another large hard drive where I can put all my project files (tiff, psd, stitches). Those files do not need to reside on the raid, where I will keep my software, my raw files and my final pictures.

I now have a bulletproof computer system and it only cost me an additional hard drive. I can even configure the system for hot-swapping, where I can remove a drive while the computer is running normally. I still have to copy all my pictures and install software, but I am finally back. And I am back with a redundant system that should be completely safe from data loss, due to my simple raid setup.

UPDATE1:

Shortly after composing this article a sobering experience set in. My computer used to freeze up when a lot of hard drive activity started on the raid array. Windows would hang but the mouse would still move around. Besides that, nothing else happened and I could ony reset the computer by pushing the power button.

I dug around for a while and came up with this forum thread. The amount of problems Nvidia seems to have with their nForce is staggering and the lack of updated drivers is just unbelievable.

To cut a long story short, I went to my local best buy and got the cheapest raid controller they had: this one

First I installed the drivers, hoping that I wouldn't have to go through a new Windows installation. I then connected the two hard drives on this card and Windows did boot right up. After it decided to rebuild the array (probably related to my previous problems) everything ran smooth. It has been quite a while of heavy data activity and so far everything runs smooth.

The card supports the full speed (3Gb/s ~ 300MB/s  <- bits vs Bytes+CRC) of the SATA II standard and does everything I want (Raid 1).