Windows 7 sleep and resume problem

[mellowtigger]

I'm stuck tonight with a new Windows 7 installation and only minimal, necessary applications reinstalled.  :(

Has anyone here used a RAID 1 array for their operating system volume?  Do you have any suggestions to offer?  I've never done it before. I am tempted, for my own peace of mind, to buy another hard drive and try a RAID 1 install for two must-be-preserved volumes: the main operating system, and old email archives.  I need to decide this weekend, before I spend any more effort reinstalling old applications.  I disapprove of any additional power usage (which a duplicate drive would require), but additional reliability would help to avoid headaches like this again.

I frequently put my Windows 7 pc into Sleep mode rather than doing a proper logoff and shutdown.  Works fine... almost all of the time.  I would sometimes experience bootup problems when Windows 7 tried to Resume operations again.  I would hear devices powering up inside my computer, then it would hang for 2-3 seconds, then the system would reboot.  Everything was fine after the reboot.  I think the problem was caused by some powered-down device not responding fast enough (a hard drive spinning up, maybe) before the motherboard (or Windows 7) gave up and rebooted instead. I very much like my ASUS Rampage Formula motherboard, so I don't want to think any ill thoughts of it yet.

During this last failed Resume, however, I permanently lost contact with a hard drive that happened to have the boot manager on it.  I figured I might as well take the opportunity to upgrade to a larger drive and reinstall everything.  That's where I'm at now.  I have also downloaded the latest BIOS update for my motherboard.  I flashed the ROM.  I rebooted.  (First, of course, I had to spend 20 minutes wondering why the system wouldn't boot again, until I finally realized that all of my previous BIOS settings were erased, so I had to set the hard drives back to ACHI mode again before they would work properly.  *sigh*)

While studying the issue, I found this very interesting utility buried inside Windows:

Start button, in the search box, enter:	cmd
In the new command line box, enter:	powercfg -energy
After it finishes (60 seconds), enter:	energy-report.html

I like my motherboard and my hard drives to be "green" technology with efficient power-down features.  I wonder, though, if that might be responsible for the slow power-up problem?  Thoughts to ponder before I commit to building any particular system configuration tonight.

The joys of technology.  Impermanence rules the world.

Comments

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

Frankly, I think it makes more sense to use a drive imaging tool (Norton Ghost, Acronis TrueImage, etc.) to regularly take a "snapshot" of the boot drive to an external hard drive than to run a mirrored RAID configuration.

[mellowtigger]

Would the duplicate drive solution, though, maybe offer some resistance to the sleep/resume problem if at least one of them responded in time to service system requests?

I suppose I should sleep/resume about 20 times now just to test out the BIOS update. Makes me wish I had a tv in the bedroom, though, to help while away the time. *twiddle*

[arkanjil.livejournal.com]

a raid system is gonna get thrashed an awful lot, especially with all the caching that modern OSes do. You would be much, much, much better off running on a static primary with regular back ups going to the RAID Ala. Time Machine, or whatever the windows equivalent is

[hilltop.livejournal.com]

I've run into headaches trying to preserve data, the least headaches way is just run an external hard drive. I just saw a 2 terrabyte USB external drive for under a hundred bucks.

Microsoft makes a utility, a free download, called SyncToy 2.1
I stash files to be backed up in a backup folder, and once a week, attach the external drive and have it synch the stuff on the main drive with the external.

There's a couple of nice pluses with this way of backing stuff up- my favorite is that the drive isn't sitting inside a case. So if you got a lightning strike or hardcore power surge, the drive with the backup data is on a shelf nice and safe. As long as you plug the thing in once a week, or daily, you should be good for a long time. Just unplug it and physically remove the thing when it's not being used.

[mellowtigger]

Nope, it did not help. Now, I actually get BSOD screens before the reboot. I guess I'll have to get in the habit of doing proper logout/shutdowns. :(

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

I've used RAID1 on XP and RAID5 on Windows Server 2000. I've also hard hard drives die under both set-ups and the RAID worked as advertised--the system kept running without any apparent interruption. Indeed, in both cases it took a while to even notice that a drive had died.

I don't know about Windows 7, but under XP and WS2k the RAID was run by the BIOS and hardware drivers, not by the OS as such. So, AFAICT, the utility of RAID under Windows is more hardware dependent than under, for example, some flavor of linux.

I highly recommend trying RAID1. The joys of mirrored drives cannot be overstate, IMO. Though, you should still do periodic static back-ups. Ideally off-site, using Carbonite or somesuch. If you're worried about security, you can always compress and encrypt the back-up locally, and then upload it to a remote server. (If you really wanted to get fancy, you could cobble together a frankenputer from old parts, and set it up to accept the raw back-ups from your Windows box, and then do the compressing, encrypting and uploading. Check out Deltacopy (http://www.aboutmyip.com/AboutMyXApp/DeltaCopy.jsp) for getting stuff from Windows into an rsync server. And, AFAIK, tape drives still exist. And, even though I'm not smart enough to have one myself, a safety deposit box is probably a good idea just in general.)

As for the "thrashing" problem with caches, I've never experienced any issues. If you're worried about it you can, as I understand, plug a USB flash drive into a Windows 7 computer and have it use that for caching. Under XP you can always add another HD and direct the swap file to it. (I forget what Windows calls its swap file.) But, honestly, a mirrored drive set-up really shouldn't have much more overhead than a lone drive. Everything is just done in duplicate, essentially simultaneously.

AFAICT, the only reason that RAID1 isn't used more widely is the hardware cost. You end up spending twice as much for the same amount of storage. That just makes no sense to the typical consumer.

(What's frustrating is that under Windows any replacement drive you end up using is entirely dedicated to the RAID, even if that drive's capacity is much larger than the drive it replaced. Meaning, if you replace a 250 GB drive with a 320 GC drive, that extra 70 GC is lost forever. Under real OSs, you could just partition the drive, add a 250 GB to the RAID, and then use the other 70 GB for something else. Though, admittedly, that could slow down the RAID considerably--but I just hate the idea of all that storage going to waste. I'm just too old, I guess--I still remember when a 1 GB hard-drive was more storage than you could ever possibly need. And you had to chunk the thing up into many partitions for DOS/Windows to even be able to use it. I don't think I ever put anything on "drives" F:\ or G:\.)