raid monitoring suggestions

[Avery1]

I'm looking for suggestions as to how to monitor the health of a software-based raid 1 set of drives. E-mail alerts would be ideal, though a pop-up warning is also acceptable.

I see a utility called 'RAID Monitor', but it is a purchase product, and quite honestly $30 is more than I want to spend solely to monitor a pair of drives.

BTW -- Would one typically monitor the health of these drives (manually) through Disk Utility? It doesn't really report health status, just 'online' status. I have a NAS that tells all the details down to the SMART info (errors, etc).

Thanks!
Avery

[jedijoe]

well, personally, $30 seems reasonable for that software. I am considering myself. Monitors RAID status and SMART status, sends emails.

I was about to spend time writing a shell script to use smartctl (command line tool from MacPorts) and diskutil. Between those two, I was going check the apple raid status and SMART status. Then, run the script periodically with launchd.

[jedijoe]

I just tried RAID Monitor. I can't get it to send email. It even has a test email feature. Logs just says "failed", try changing your settings. I've tried all possible settings. (My email is run on a MacMini using OS X Server, using the same settings as I use for SMTP in Mail.app)

I think I will just write the shell script after all. Its free and I know it works.

[dave-tx]

Originally Posted by Avery1

I'm looking for suggestions as to how to monitor the health of a software-based raid 1 set of drives. E-mail alerts would be ideal, though a pop-up warning is also acceptable.

I see a utility called 'RAID Monitor', but it is a purchase product, and quite honestly $30 is more than I want to spend solely to monitor a pair of drives.

BTW -- Would one typically monitor the health of these drives (manually) through Disk Utility? It doesn't really report health status, just 'online' status. I have a NAS that tells all the details down to the SMART info (errors, etc).

Thanks!
Avery

I'm pretty sure Disk Utility will report more than just "online" status. I had to rebuild a RAID1 a week ago, and while it did say "online", it also reported that it was "degraded", highlighted in orange.

At least that's what I remember. Since it's been fixed, I can't go back and check specifically.

[jedijoe]

Originally Posted by dave-tx

I'm pretty sure Disk Utility will report more than just "online" status. I had to rebuild a RAID1 a week ago, and while it did say "online", it also reported that it was "degraded", highlighted in orange.

At least that's what I remember. Since it's been fixed, I can't go back and check specifically.

Yea, but does Disk Utility have email alerts? (for remote computers, email alerts are more useful)

If you wanted email, raid, and smart status all bundled into one, Disk Utility doesn't cut it. RAID Monitor UI was nice, the daemon was very small (both in memory and on disk) and used next to nothing in terms of CPU resources. I thought it was nice. Two things I didn't like about it

(1) I just couldn't get it to use my SSL SMTP server to send emails (its a Mac OS X server on a Mac Mini).. Maybe it was due to my self-signed SSL cert, but all I got from the RAID Monitor was "failed". Maybe an issue on my end.

(2) The only SMART thing it monitored was the general smart status flag (at least what I could tell from the GUI in demo mode). It would be nice to see temperatures, seek errors, reallocated sectors, etc.