SIAFIT (Set-It-And-Forget-It)

One of out forum members ttomm has put together a software package by the name of SIAFIT (Set-It-And-Forget-It) that notifies you in advance of hard drive issues by monitoring and periodically testing and sending emails if there is anything you need to know about.

Here’s the details:

About a year ago two things happened at about the same time:

1. Drive Extender was eliminated from the WHS 2011 build. This caused me to start thinking about ways to effectively extend the useful life of WHS v1
2. First one and then another of my WHS buddies started having hard drive issues.

Regarding #1

I knew that WHS without DE would not meet my needs and suspected that it would fail to meet others needs as well. As a measure of the new WHS’s lack of popularity, WHS 2011 now sells online for less than $50, a price lower than WHS v1 ever sold for. So what can be done to keep the original WHS actively meeting our needs? The answer falls into two separate issues:

• Software Support – Microsoft will maintain WHS until 2015 (that is, issue security updates)
• Hardware – WHS was originally release in late 2007. That means that early adopters have equipment that is reaching 5 years of age (or older if you reused hardware to build yours like I did.) What is most likely to fail first? THE HARD DRIVE(s)!

Regarding #2

I was researching the issues my friends were having with WHS hard drives and I came across a study done by Google Labs about predicting hard drive failures. They found that some SMART indicators (hard drive Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) could predict that a specific hard drive was 39 times more likely to fail than its cousins.

#1 plus #2

So put the hard ware issue in #1 together with #2 and the result is SIAFIT.exe (Set It and Forget It.) The idea being that even though I was now educated by Goggle’s findings I knew that I’d not have the tenacity to manually monitor all my hard drives over the long haul. I needed something I could setup once and then could truly be forgotten until it needed to get my attention.

Note:

• SIAFIT is not a Home Server Console add-in. It is invisible – the forget it part.
• If you’re worried about installing some crackpot’s software package

1. Go to the website and read more
2. Open everything up and take a look. Open the zip file and then use WinRAR to open and inspect the exe. This is free. What would I need to password protect anything for?

P.S. There is a Windows 7 version on the website also. The folks I had test SIAFIT so much they asked me to modify it for Windows 7 as well.

Great stuff ttomm, and you can read more about SIAFIT here.

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