Windows headless NAS

[sebbiep]

Long time Pro user - not many previous Qs - but 2nd question this week - sorry!

I have half my houses's drives on my main PC (a powerfull Dell Precision Worsktation with server grade components) and the other half on Synology NAS's (via your Linux app and smartmontools' smartctl for the Synology expansion unit and SSD cache drives which don't get picked up in the hdsreport.html).

I have some small spare drives and recently noticed my old retired previous Dell Precsion still has plenty of power and I/O capacity. Hence I'm in the process of setting it up as a Windows headless NAS with 8 capacity drives and 2 cache drives (plus 4 OS, App & Misc drives).

I want to monitor all my house' storage array drives in one place from my daily use PC. It's obvioulsy not the end of the world, but I'd prefer not to monitor 155 drives on my main PC and then to check just the other 14 drives on HDS via remote desktop on the other PC - this is not efficient. I have no requirement to monitor the drives on all my other general PCs , Surface Pro tablets and IOT devices etc (nothing valuable to lose) - it's only the large central storage archive and backup arrays (~1PB on one PC and NAS) that I am interested in. I trialled your Enterprise Server a few years ago. I prefer the interface from the main HDS Pro app and I also have this set-up very nicely with lots of tweaks to cope with my large number of drives.

Over the years I am sure that HDS has saved me a lot of time in avoiding any storage volume crashes (none that could not be recovered, without requiring backup restore, in over 10 years), as I've been able to swap out drives before they cause issues. My failure stats are well under professional industry averages.

I tested loading the hdsreport.html and smartctl txt files (run by script and renamed appropriately) from the Window's NAS into my main PC - but they both failed. The individual files (html from HDS and txt from Smartmontools) look line-for-line identical to those from my Synology NAS's. Is this possible please? Obviously I will gladly pay whatever licence is required - i.e. extra Pro licence for the 2nd Windows PC, family Pro licence or Enterprise Server Licence - although I am a home user (albeit on storage steroids), rather than an Enterprise user and I do prefer the standard HDS Pro GUI.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message and question!

Sorry, but I'm afraid it is not possible to load HTML / txt reports from Windows versions/systems this way, sorry.

The NAS monitoring function is generally designed to monitor systems where the Windows version of Hard Disk Sentinel is not available: Linux systems (by the Linux version) and/or other systems where only smartctl can be used to produce the required details.

Generally under Windows, Hard Disk Sentinel Pro installations can be used - but the "output" of one can't be load to an other instance to "merge" the list of both systems, sorry...