Two separate years running I had RAID drives blow out while I was on vacation and a second RAID drive blow out before I got back. Meaning I had to rebuild the whole $%#%!!! thing from scratch both times.
The HP hotswap drives I worked with were packaged such that pressing the drive's quick-release lever would power it down clean. Of course, since the drive was supposedly kaput, that was a lesser concern, but it's always possible to press the wrong lever (whoops!). My bigger problem was in finding exact-match replacement disks after a year or 2 of service. You'd think in a company with over 1200 people in it, someone might have a spare. But unfortunately, most of them weren't into 10K RPM hot-swap servers. To say nothing of tape library units. At least with Linux, heterogeneous RAID isn't an issue. William, if you have 2 spares, you ought to consider RAID-6. It can handle cases like what I was getting. Tim On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 16:02 -0500, William L. Thomson Jr. wrote: > On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 15:50 -0500, robert mckennon wrote: > > believe it or not, I have never actually swapped out a hard-drive in a > > raided system. > > We all have our first time with something at some point. No one was born > knowing or having done it all before ;) > > > I have a HP Proliant ML350 G4p running RHEL 5.3 with a bad drive in a > > raid-5. > > Assuming you have a HP Smart Array controller or some RAID controller. > > > It says it's hot-swappable.... but is that the best practice, or > > should I shut down and then replace the drive? > > If the machine is still running, usually the drive will already be taken > out of use by the raid controller. Which if thats the case, red light > vs green, or could be another color on the drive in question. Then you > can safely remove the drive and add back a new one. If using HP Smart > Arrays can use the hpacucli to check status, make changes, etc to the > array while the machine is up and running. > > If you want you can take it down. Though you might find yourself with > more than one bad drive going that route. I would just swap out the > drive now with a known good one. Let it do its thing, once its back in > use and you have a spare again. If you want to be really cautious and > can take down the server. Then a reboot can't hurt. It will > re-initialize controller and do a test on most all drives. > > Last time I lost a drive for some reason it cause the server to lock up. > Though that was before any attempt to replace the drive. A reboot > brought the machine back up, but drive was still dead, and luckily just > that one. After that replaced the drive, and all has been well ever > since. So at times freakish things can happen, even though they > technically should not. I am running RAID 5 with 2 spares, so should not > have effected the server running, but did. > --------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive http://marc.info/?l=jaxlug-list&r=1&w=2 RSS Feed http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.xml Unsubscribe [email protected]
