Raid 5 monitoring software

[claussensj]

I have an ASUS M5A97 motherboard with an AMD FX-4170 Zambezi 4.2 GHz quad-core processor and have 8 GB of RAM. Running Windows Home Server 2011 w/SP1. I have a RAID-5 set up with four 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green drives for my data storage (using the RAID controller built into the ASUS MB). I like the protection I get with the RAID-5 array, but it is rather limited if I don’t know when one of my drives fail. What I am looking for is some utility that will run it the background and monitor the health of my drives. Having this utility also monitor the health of the processor and fans would be a bonus. I would like for this utility to give me notice (either by e-mail or text message – prefer e-mail at this point) if any reading gets out of an acceptable range. The motherboard manufacturer does not have a utility that will monitor the drives in a RAID array. Does anybody know of something I can use for this? Thanks, SC

 

[dingo07]

You should get a dedicated RAID controller that comes with its own software and forget about the unfinished on-board RAID controller

 

[ss202sl]

I think you're actually using the raid controller built into the amd chipset.
use AMD RAIDXpert

http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/raid_windows.aspx

 

[claussensj]

Ss202sl – thanks for the info. I loaded the AMD RAIDXpert utility. It is able to see the drives in my RAID and seems to be reporting they are OK. It has the option to send me an e-mail if it sees something wrong, but I don’t have an e-mail server (this is for a home data server I built) so I have not been able to figure out how to get that feature to work. I have a gmail account, but don’t know if it will work with that since I have not been able to figure out how to force it to send a message

 

[claussensj]

Best answer selected by claussensj.