On Tue, 2011-02-01 at 16:17 -0500, Tim Holloway wrote: > 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.
I keep spare drives and a spare raid card in my rack. Which makes it really easy to avoid such issues with remote hands. If available where your servers are, if not, might consider such :) > 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!). You can definitely do that, but I tend to prefer to not just yank an active drive out. Though not sure offhand how to deactivate it before hand, I assume there is a way, but maybe not. > 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. eBay to the rescue most times. One nice thing about older hardware, you can get spare parts for days on the cheap from eBay. Its kinda my new way of doing things, vs always buying new. Though there is a balance to that, not everything new, and not everything old or used. > 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. Smart Array controller does not support that I do not believe. Or like RAID 10 (1/0). I am fine with RAID 5 for now. I was just doing mirroring for years, with no real hot swap capability. Kinda of funny, never really had drives fail in use. Till I had a machine with hot swap drives, though those tend to fail more as a result of age. Most times the one thing I will always buy new, or refurb is hard drives. Though given prices at times for new, you can get a bunch of spares going used. Just have to make sure test drives a bit first. -- William L. Thomson Jr. Obsidian-Studios, Inc. http://www.obsidian-studios.com This message (including any attachments) contains confidential information intended for a specific individual and purpose, and is protected by law. If you are not the intended recipient, you should delete this message. Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited. --------------------------------------------------------------------- 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]
