[nathane]

Hi all,

I have been looking at building a NAS for my home and I have noticed that Windows 8 now contains a pretty decent system for protecting my drives (I'm talking about the Storage Spaces feature).

I know we have had Raid 5 support in the past but I very much like the idea of being able to grow the "Storage Pool" by replacing the drives with larger ones when they die and eventually being able to make use of the extra space.

Once of the most important things to me is HOW the user get notified when there is an error on the array (Storage Pool). I have been playing with yanking out drives while writing data and the scary thing is that the system doesn't actually alert you anything is wrong except for the tiny 'action center' flag appearing in the lower right hand corner of the screen. The other kinda annoying thing is that this flag doesn't show anywhere on the Start Screen, only on desktop mode.

LASTLY, another scary thing is that even if you do notice that a message has appeared in the action center, you are told that the drive missing or failing ISN'T a high importance issue!!! Its a general maintenance message ??

So my question is, does anybody know a better way to get these action center messages? I googled for email notifications from the action center but found nothing. I suspect this is because the action center has been a fairly useless feature of Windows until now.

Or alternatively, can anybody recommend a better Storage pool system with email notifications?. I have tried lots but I would be interested in hearing what others have to say.

Thanks all.
Don't drink and drive

[nathane]

What profanity was in my post??????????

[nathane]

Bumps are probably not allowed here..

[TerryNet]

Bumps are good. Best to do them after a day or two of no replies.

[nathane]

Thanks bud. Didn't want a repeat of my Windows Text File incident

I think the main issue with this Hard Drive issue is the the windows notification area has never really displayed anything useful up until now. I wonder how hard it would be to write a simple notifier for windows.. this has gots me thinking