by Gus Hrncir
I am tired of losing the files on my computer because the hard drive failed and my last backup was thirty days ago.
During “Tax Season 1998” I lost a hard drive during the first week of April 1998, this disaster occurred on the computer I had my tax software and tax data on. The computer hard drive was 12 months old and should not have failed. I scrambled to get my system back up and running and after two days I was able to once again prepare tax returns. The lesson learned, back up more often!
SUMMARY OF THE PROBLEM: I need a fail-safe place to keep my data files, with the ability to easily back up these files. I need to back up my data automatically with no involvement on my part. I get too involved in my work and do not back up the hard drive. My excuse for not backing up the files more often is no time to do it now, or I will do it later, or I forgot.
Three weeks ago I discovered Promise Technology Inc.’s DRIVE DEFENDER on the shelf at the local computer super store. In big letters on the box the box said…”Constantly saves data to second hard drive, continuous operation if one drive fails, works at maximum drive speed.” I bought the card for $100. I also purchased a hard drive to match the one in the computer for $200.00 and went home with my new toys.
INSTALL THE CARD: Installing the PROMISE TECHNOLOGY DRIVE DEFENDER and software takes only a few minutes. Included in the box is the DRIVE DEFENDER CARD, two IDE cables, instruction manual, software and registration card.
I installed the new hard drive (which had equal capacity of the old drive) in an empty drive bay, plugged in the IDE cables to the card, plugged the Drive Defender Card in a PCI slot on my mother board, attached the loose end of the IDE cables to the hard drives, attached the power connectors to the hard drive. Connect the LED cable from your computer case to the DRIVE DEFENDER so you can monitor disk activity. Easy to install, takes more time to describe it than to do it.
BOOT THE SYSTEM: Turn on the computer and the on-board Drive Defender software will detect two undefined hard drives and will set up both drives for data protection. The on-board software will ask you several questions to help configure your card to your drives. Each time you boot the computer the software will confirm the existence of both hard drives and that data protection is working.
After you install and configure Drive Defender, reboot your system and Windows 95/98 will generate a “New Hardware Found” dialog box, and “Unknown PCI Device” will be detected. Install the Windows 95/98 software from the utility software disk.
Confirm the installation by going to: my computer/properties/device manager tab, then click on the “+” in front of the “SCSI controllers”. “Promise technology, Inc. PCI Drive Defender Driver (Win95)” should appear.
UTILITY SOFTWARE: Install the Drive Defender Utility Software to help you monitor the health of your hard drives. An icon will then be placed on your status bar.
If one hard drive fails, the software will indicate which drive has failed. You can continue to use one drive, but to regain full data protection you must replace the failed drive.
HARD DRIVE FAILURE: I simulated the failure of one of the hard drives by unplugging the power hookup to one hard drive, then turned on the computer. The utility software warned me of this failure and told me which drive was bad. I was still able to use this system and could test it by accessing several Excel files without any problems. One other test was to access some jpg files on the test machine from a remote network machine. The results of this test were positive, I could not tell any difference that one drive had failed from performance of the test system. I removed and replaced the failed drive with a similar capacity hard dive.
Reboot the system, and Drive Defender will inform you that it has detected a new drive, which has replaced a failed drive. Drive Defender will re-enable data protection during setup and guide you through a process to rebuild the newly replaced drive from the good drive.
Reboot your system and Drive Defender will report “the two hard drives contain identical (mirrored) data and Drive Defender is once again providing full data protection.”
THE TEST MACHINE: Let me describe the test machine, AMD 233 chip, Super Micro Motherboard, 64MB RAM, two 6.4 Western Digital hard drives, Diamond 3D 2000 video card, Sparq 1.0 internal drive, Win98, and a APC battery backup.
If you use Windows Explorer to look at the hard drives you will see only one drive with two partitions. You must use the utility software Fastcheck to verify the operation of the two hard drives.
NETWORK SERVER: The results of the tests were excellent but I wanted to “push” this new technology even further. I designated my test machine to be the “file server” on a peer to peer Windows 98 network.
The server machine hard drive is split into two partitions. Drive C holds the system files and is not shared, Drive D is shared, this is the data file directory where all data files from all machines on the network are stored.
When you install your software you must tell it to use the “server machine” to store your data. This software setup is more complex than the default setup.
Here is what I have achieved by using the Drive Defender card in my computer:
• Protect my data from hard drive failure.
• Help me organize my network to have a secure place to put all my data
• Data backup for archival purposes is quicker and easier because it is in one place and is handled with a Sparq 1.0 GB drive.
• Maintenance in the event one drive fails is quick and simple (suggest you purchase an extra hard drive that matches the two in your system for a spare)
Gus Hrncir is a Director of HAL-PC and an active member of the Build or Buy a PC SIG, he can be reached at hrncir@hal-pc.org
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