Just to share my experiences. No specific finding except that MS operating system s*cks – again. And well, I also tell you how to get the progress of your software Raid resyncing the disks.

I recently found that on my MS Server 2008 R2 the Highest Active Time of my Disk in the Ressource Monitor is constantly at 50%. This obviously annoyed for two reasons: a) it slowed the system down a lot and b) i needed to know the reason for this since this server hosts several production applications.

Resyncing the raid lead to permanent activity of both Disks.

I quickly figured the reason: A recent hardreset of the windows maschine forced it to resync the whole Raid 1. However, it seemd to take way to long, so i wanted to know the progress of the resync process. About an hour of google and frustration later i was sure, it is again a bug or missing translation or whatever in the OS. All hints from google led me to Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Disk Management (or just search for Disk Management in Windows start menu). The Disk Management is supposed to show the percent of syncing. Not so in my case. Some hints told me to press F5 or right-click -> Refresh or Action -> Refresh or clicking on the Disk, then on More Actions then on Refresh… Nothing helped. So i decided to not spend more time and give the sync just one more day.

No progress report of the resync is shown, no matter what i tryed

When i came back to work 30 minutes later, the progress was magically there! And it was not just good luck, I actually was able to reproduce this behaviour. The Panel does not show the progress untill it changes a full percent! Well, 1 full percent of a 3TB Disk may need some time, in my case about 30 minutes (given the system is not in complete idle).

So my advice is: Just open the Disk Management and … wait. After 30 minutes or so you should get the information you need. Thanks Microsoft!

After 30 minutes the needed information appeared magically!

Another great MS feature is that there is no build in tool to get informed about the health state of your software raid. In my next post i show you how to get email informations if something with your raid gets wrong.