How to make your on-air computers have a mirrored or a backup drive
Q: I have suffered through one hard drive failure already, what can be to make it less painful if it should happen again? Should I get an additional hard drive and make nightly back-ups of the critical files and configuration settings on the computers at each location?
A: How to make your on-air computers have a mirrored drive or a backup drive:
It is not necessarily hard for stations using their own standard computers to upgrade them to fault-tolerant, "mirrored drive" or at least to have a ready bootable backup drive (so in the event of failure you aren't wasting a day reinstalling Windows and the system from scratch).
WireReady sells computers that have "hot-swap RAID" mirrored drives. Hot swapping is the state of the art when it comes to mission critical computers. The idea is if one drive fails - you don't AND you don't have to do ANYTHING when a drive fails. You get a red light, warning and/or email. You can literally pull the bad drive out the front - while it's still on the air - slide the new one in - turn the key and you're done. Many high end servers and workstaitons have these types of systems. For simplicity sake, our computers use the simple RAID 1 - simple mirroring. Two drives act as one - in fact Windows doesn't even realize there are two drives - it only sees one. Think of RAID 1 like a battery backup system. If the power goes out - the battery kicks in. With RAID 1 mirroring, if the primary drive dies or a problem is detected, it instantly flips to the backup drive (which is always spinning and has the identical up to the second data that the primary drive does).
You can make your existing computers hot-swappable with this recommendation:
You could have a local computer person attempt to put the hotswap system in your air machines as follows.
Determine if the computers have at least two punch out 5.25" bays in the front of the machine (not counting the CD-ROM). If two panels can be popped out and it appears there are drive bays behind them (doubtful but worth a look) you could have a local person do the following: If you don't have front accessible bays- you can still do a RAID 1 system but the drives will be internally mounted which means you can't hot swap. If a drive fails - you have to shut down and replace the bad drive and boot it back up. It is also possible to buy an external box for the hard-drives if your machine doesn't have front accessible bays.
1) Put a Promise TX2000 "pro kit" (circa $200) in. This consists of a PCI card (you must have an available PCI slot) - and two 5.25" aluminum hot swap cages that slide in those open front-accessible bays. As of the end of 2005, we still use and recommend the TX2000 Promise RAID kit. Since most computers use standard inexpensive IDE/ATA drives- this IDE/ATA based RAID system operates at 100mbits or faster, and supports large drives, and it's flexible in that you can mix different model drives if you have to (although ideally try to keep the models the same). And if you ever want to remove the card - either drive can be directly connected to the motherboard again if you decide to eliminate the RAID system later. The Promise TX2000 works with XP/2000 and 2003 and it even can be used with older Win98 systems if your nursing a legacy DOS or Win98 based system.
2) Buy a second hard-drive. It need not be identical - but it needs to be the same size (it's safer to get one size up - if you currently have an 80gb- get a 100GB (not all 80GB are exactly the same size- and if the 2nd drive is even a few bytes shorter than the other- the raid will reject it with an error when you put it in. 100GB drives are around $99 local. As mentioned the Promise TX2000 RAID card needs two drives - the new one you add becomes a backup for the first. Note if your computer already has more than one drive, we do not recommend you attempt this kind of system.
3) If your local computer person hasn't built these kinds of systems - pay us $500 per station or $1000 for a multi-station job (think of it as insurance/consulting fee). This way, we aren't nailed if we have any unanticipated uh-oh's. We can walk you through this - since we've done over 100 of them. If you don't pay this fee and you mess up the system and we have to reinstall or reconfigure an automation from scratch we'll charge a lot more. This type of major hardware upgrade is not covered by our basic Silver and Gold support plans (but is covered by Platinum).
Parts thus will run you $300 per computer (unless you use a bigger drive, then maybe $400) and our cost if you want us involved, supervising and standing by in case of difficulty will be $500 per station or $1000 for a multi-station upgrade.
We really recommend hot-swap RAID 1 systems. Just having to reinstall Windows these days can keep a station down all day - so why take the chance? To date - we haven't had someone lose thier data/need to reinstall Windows yet - except for one nameless fellow who refused to do anything when they got the warning that one drive failed. The ONLY way, in theory anyway, you can get hosed is if you let one drive fail - and then sit there for months until the other one goes. Granted you have to be really careless to let this happen. AS mentioned, you get a nasty red light on the front of the machine, you will get a pop up warning (if configured) and you can even get an email (the latter is a bit of a pain to enable but it can be done). Statistically, drives go years between failures - so if you have a double drive system and one fails, odds are you have months (at least to replace it before the other drive fails). For this reason, RAID customers should check for a red light monthly (if the machine isn't in the open) - or configure their systems to do pop up warnings (or emails) if a drive has trouble.
If you want - we can sell you the hardware above. The pro kits are $199 each and the drives will be $119 for drives up to 120GB, $249 for drives up to 200GB and $299 for 300GB and larger. We'll also charge about $50 in shipping since these are special orders (slightly more if you are ordering multiple units).
Here is a synopsis on how these types of kits are installed after the fact:
Prepare to run your station for an hour, maybe two during the transition since your air system has to be taken down to do this. The system is down during the upgrade - but it should be fast:
Install floppy disk driver and shut down - 5 minutes
Install PCI raid card and boot - 5 minutes
Do not connect the card to anything at this time.
PNP detection - install floppy driver.
Verify that driver and card is detected and running- 5 minutes
SHUT DOWN.
Pop case off/remove bays (they are often still half connected and have to be popped/pryed off - 15 minutes
Install cages - 15 minutes
Connect cages to card with included high end IDE cables. CH1 cable to top, CH2 cable to bottom bay.
Move original drive to TOP cage- 5 minutes
Move new drive into BOTTOM cage (very important - if new drive isn't put in bottom cage - you lose your original data!!)
A BIOS screen comes up - you have to define an array - 1x2 mirror. It will construct the mirror - 30-60 minutes depending on the amount of data. 100GB drives or smaller can mirror in as little as 20 minutes - 300GB can easily take an hour or two.
On completion, you hit any key - then it will boot and you're done.
You're now mirrored. If either drive should fail again - you won't.
If you REALLY want to be ready for disaster - keep one new drive on the
shelf. That way, the first day you see there's a drive failure you can
slide in a replacement. Remember with hot swap - you don't even stop the
station - just turn a key- pull bad drive out - slide new drive in, turn
the key back and forget about it.
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BACKUP DRIVE APPROACH (for customers who can't do a hotswap RAID system)
An alternative to this would be to hire a computer guy familiar using Norton GHOST 2003 or later.
You'd buy one drive for each computer you want. Open computer and internally mount the drive. Temporarily connect the drive as a SLAVE (very important) drive. He'd use Norton and "ghost" the drive. Takes probably 20-30 minutes maybe longer based on amount of files on drive. When done - temporarily disconnect original drive IDE cable - and change new drive to MASTER and test boot and make sure it runs WireReady and looks identical. If it works - then you disconnect the backup drive, and reconnect the original drive - boot and FORGET about it. If tragedy strikes - you open machine - move IDE cable over to the
ready/willing drive and it's like going back in time.
So long as you have had us setup a Windows task (at least weekly) scheduled backup routine to backup the playlists, user INI file custom.dat (custom command) files, and rotation files to your production computer, after you boot, we'd copy back those playlist/rotation config files - then you'd SYNC your audio folders, and you'd be back in business - and perhaps copy WR32.EXE (if the production version is newer than the version you had at the time of the ghost (down for no more than maybe an hour).
Caution - what I describe above is SIMPLE and almost TRIVIAL - but the slightest oops careless mistake on the part of your installer can ghost backwards (i.e ghosting the old data over the new if he doesn't pick the right drive as the source (master will always be first drive which is why I suggest making the backup drive a slave during the ghost procedure). So anytime you want to re-ghost the drive (not necessary unless you've made major changes to the computer) you have to do this jumpering stuff. But in theory one ghost ought to do it.
As simple as this sounds - do not attempt to do this with someone who isn't very familiar with jumpering drives between master and slave and has worked with IDE drives a lot and/or hasn't used Ghost before. Common mistakes are ghosting a blank drive onto the real one (oops) or not jumpering, or re-jumpering the drives before and after doing the ghosting. You don't want somenoe learning these oops with your air system.
The RAID system is pretty idiot-proof because as long as the original drive is in the top bay (which is connected to Channel 1 on the card) and the bottom drive is on Channel 2 - the RAID system automatically will mirror the top to the bottom (ch 1 to ch 2).
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