Looking for a freeware utility that will give me S.M.A.R.T.
information on an external USB hard drive. I did find HD Tune <http://
www.hdtune.com> but that works on internal drives only.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

please don't bash me if I ask stupid things.  I am only an "acting admin".
The situation is as follows: a storage box (3TB) configured as RAID5.  One
volume, one LUN.  An FC switch.  Three servers.  
I would not like to use (for now) a clustering FS.

As part of my work on copying files from a laptop, i tangentially came
across the topic of dynamic vs basic disks.
I am looking for some validation/verification of the following:
From my reading, it seems that basic disks are more "portable" (i.e.

I'm looking at these disk enclosures and trying to decide which to
get.  I like big fans but I've heard complaints that the ICY fan
(80MM) is loud.  OTOH, I dislike tiny fans and would want to hook up
fan-failure or over-temp alarms if I get the KINGWIN.

Earlier this year I formatted and rewrote win xp but for some reason the
main and only internal drive was assigned as C: (F:) which some software on
cd would not recognize and I never could find a good way resolve it.
I recently did a fdisk on the mbr and ended up having to a xp ...

when thinking about consolidating SAN islands into one large SAN versus
keeping SANs less complex I recently read an article with pros and cons.
The problem is I can't find it anymore ;-(
The article states that a few years ago the goal of IT departments was

on a dell server what does 2x4 backplane mean?  thanks.

I have a laptop that has 2 hard drives in it (have taken out dvd burner to
allow 2nd hard drive in that spot) Now i can get Hirens BootCD 9.5 to been
seen and booted fine using external burner but when you ask it to go into
ghost or driveimage it keeps coming up with tons of ...

I am aware that there has been lots of debate as to whether defragging
is necessary, but if one chooses to use such software, what is the
latest and greatest in the defrag software wars?
Thanks

My son's Dell Studio 17 won't boot after a recent vista upgrade. the
suggestion is to use the recovery dvd, which will wipe out his data
files (no, he did  not back them up..different topic). It appears to
be a s/w issue not a hardware defect issue.

I have gotten 5 drives and 4 of them failed within an hour. Yes, the
warranty replacements gotten directly from Seagate failed just like the
orginal 2 new ones purchased from an online retailer. One of the original
warranty replacements is still working, though I'm not really ...

Pretty glad I found this group because reading the posts it seems that
there are many tech-savvy people hanging around in here. I would first
like to thank anyone who responds and helps me with my problem. It is
greatly appreciated!  This is gonna be long-winded and I apologise.

just got these newest exam dumps :
250-365 - Data Protection Administration for Windos(NBU 6.5)
250-265 - Data Protection Administration for Unix(NBU 6.5)
250-250 Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0 Administration for UNIX

I built a nice, fast system for myself recently, and have been using the
onboard SATA II controller for the 2 hard drives (1 velociraptor, 1 Hitachi 7k1000)
and 1 optical drive (Blu-Ray burner) I'm using.  I may install more drives in
the future, but probably not.

Been using Acronis True Image for WinXP, but am now dual booting with Vista.
Anyone recommend imaging software that can properly handle the dual boot?
Thanks