Use case of Hard Disk Sentinel in 2023
Written by Tony Leps
Owner | Video Producer
If you have a hard disk, you need Hard Disk Sentinel.
It features maintenance and monitoring capabilities I've only seen in enterprise OEM solutions, supporting all types of hard disks, a vast number of controllers, all within a single application. It's literally saved me thousands of dollars through recovered drives and time I would have spent rebuilding arrays and data rescue.
As a small, self-employed, Orlando-based video production company with big clients like Disney, having reliable storage is critical to my business. I have a self-built and administered custom storage solution with ~300TB across 50 drives (and growing).
I'm a creative producer, but was previously a certified, enterprise-level, systems, network, and SAN administrator for over two decades, managing Dell, HP, Oracle, & Cisco hardware. Unexpectedly, my IT skills have been a crucial to success in this highly technical field, specifically maintaining and growing this storage system.
I discovered Hard Disk Sentinel while searching for software to test yet another failed drive. What I found was nothing short of amazing.
First, I was shocked (and delighted) that it could natively identify and report information about the drives behind my RAID controller, something I'd only seen in OEM software. Then it showed the drive I was about to discard was not failing, but had a cabling issue. Inspection of other drives also showed this was systemic. In the process, it revealed an assumed healthy drive in another array had multiple bad sectors. Further, I was able to identify the cause of an intermittent NMVe performance issue; it was throttling due overheating. And while I was checking temperatures, I found two fans in the array were running at half speed causing the drives in those bays to run hotter.
I replaced all SFF cables, reset the error values, RMA'ed the bad sector drive, replaced the NVMe heatsink/fan, and corrected the bay fan speeds. Oh, and the almost discarded "failed drive" was the key to saving an array without a recent backup. The system is now running flawlessly and I finally have the ability to prevent problems instead of reacting to them.
Additionally, the Surface Test feature allowed me to go through my box of "discard" drives, easily determining which ones were riddled with bad sectors and amazingly recovering many to be repurposed for cold storage.
As for support, Hard Disk Sentinel owner and developer Janos far exceeded my expectations by personally troubleshooting an issue and creating a patch in rapid succession.
The issue appeared after creating an array from a new set of drives. Strangely, Hard Disk Sentinel only reported the logical drive and not the individual disks. All other individual disks were showing correctly. I sent the support request and Janos reached out directly. It turned out the new drives were formatted as 4kn instead of 512e, causing difficulty identifying the individual drives of the array. Within a day, Janos sent a patch, and all drives now show properly.
Disks fail; it's not a matter of if, but when. Hard Disk Sentinel provides the tools needed to proactively monitor and manage any storage system. It's now an essential part of my toolkit to ensure data integrity and high-availability for my business, while saving time and money.
Tony Leps
Owner | Video Producer