SATA RAID Enclosure w/ Temperature Monitoring?

vanyel asks: "Yesterday, my external USB 2.0 drive enclosure finished cooking a 3/4 full 200G drive after its fan quit working who knows how long ago. In the time honored tradition of closing the barn door *after* the horse has wandered away, I'm accelerating my quest for a RAID solution. In particular, I want something that will support 4 SATA drives and has temperature monitoring that doesn't require a particular vendor's RAID card or Windows. Better yet, is there a RAID-5 NAS that isn't in the $4-5000USD price range. Anyone with a better barn door to close this problem with?"

Comments

Use SMART?

[crow]

At least with ATA drives, you can usually use smartd to monitor your drives. This includes temperature and various failure indicators. Usually when a drive fails, there is plenty of warning from small failures that the drive recovers from. When you run smartd, you can receive these warnings.

Re:Use SMART?

[Sepper]

I second that. You can have Smart Run a script when things fails, like Mailing the details of the failiure and then turning off the computer.

For other computer parts lsensor might do the trick.
For exemple: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Monitor_your_hard_dis k(s)_with_smartmontools

if it's an external device, the best thing would be to get a controlable UPS And turn off (again with a small script)

Just think RAID, UPS, smart monitors and deamons and with a bit of imagination, you can come up with a soultion.

Re:Use SMART?

[isorox]

Every week would have done. Simply have a daily cron job that greps you logs for fatal messages and email them to you.

Re:Use SMART?

[endx7]

And best of all, SMART works with not just ATA, but SATA too, which is what asker seems to be asking for.

Re:Use SMART?

[raxhonp]

And then use hddtemp to ease monitoring your drives.

Buy a heat alarm for $10

[Anonymous Coward]

PCPowerCooling.com sells an overheating alarm for $10. I put it in all the systems I build.

Alarm Available Here

Re:Avoid RAID5

[TheGratefulNet]

true.

no array is ever completely fault tolerant.

you STILL need backups.

but raid helps get you buy during the 3am disk failure and you don't want to drive 50miles to replace a failed disk.

in the AM, when you get to work, THEN you replace it.

raid is not subs. for backups. but it helps get you thru the single spindle failures.

its better than NOT having it.