Today I noticed the RAID utility icon in the dock and I couldn’t remember having started it. Weird. Clicked on it and this is what I see:
(Click the image for full size.)
Oh, sh*t, a drive just died. “Just” died? No, not really, it died a week ago, and I didn’t notice. That’s not good. Normally, RAID Utility pops up at start to tell you something is going wrong, but what happens is that with Snow Leopard all apps restart in the state they were when closed down, so RAID Utility gets covered by all that other stuff. Any dire warnings are hidden, unless you look for them.
What RAID Utility should do is scream bloody murder, bounce the dock icon, send emails, create Growl popups, any and all of that, but it does none of them. Considering that running on a degraded RAID set is actually several times more risky than not running on RAID at all, the system really should take notifying the user more seriously.
A week… could just as well have been a month or until the next drive failed. Now let’s see if I get a new one from Seagate before another one goes titsup. Checking my backups as we speak…