Hard Disk performance
 

Here is the situation:

A client had a raid 0 setup that according to him, was losing speed due to bad drive. So I disconnected the drives from Raid and put one on IDE 0 and reinstalled Windows. I know I know this is a Linux forum, but I do most of my diagnostics thru a Linux bootable because I know Linux better.

Here is my question... is there a way to see the performance of a drive and early warning signs of failure iwth any Linux tools that I can use? I have never had to do this myself before. And if I do have a failure about to occur, what command in linux could I use to copy the contents of that drive over to the new one. I was thinking dd but would that copy the drive perfectly?

Of course I could setup a raid 1 configuration for mirroring, but I didnt really want to do that if I can avoid it. Save me work :)

Putting the hard drive on another system that is already setup in a RAID array will destroy the data. Also I would not use Linux if the RAID was created in Windows unless its a hardware RAID controller. I think the client used a software RAID controller. You should have ask the client if they are willing to buy another hard drive, so you can make a few suggestions. What I read is Promise controllers using one channel so RAID 0 will have a hard time transfering 60 MB/sec. Controllers from Highpoint will be better for RAID 0 and they are compatible for many Linux kernel versions.

Windows partitions get fragmented so I would try defragging. RAID 0 is not smart to use to increase OS performance. RAID 1 will be better to access files faster when using IDE or SATA hard drives.

You can use smartmon but it will not tell you if the drive is healthy. Even the hard drive manufacture's diagnostic program will not tell you if it is healthy.

If you think its bad replace it, but I suggest backing up the data first before starting any fixing.

This is Highpoint controller, but I decided to hook them up to the raid controller as mirror. I think the performance reduction was due to fragmentation, but if not, at least it is constantly backed up.