Making a windows server 2008 raid offline so I can move drives.

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richms

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#175187 20-Jun-2015 15:09

I have 4 5tb drives in an external esata box running a software raid 5 on server 2008. its really slow since its all sharing a single esata connection and the mulitplier in the box seems to be a piece of junk.

It takes about 4 days to resync so am not keen on doing that again.

In the past I have moved disks around and then whats happened is it has not detected them all on start up so the raid gets marked as needing resync. Yay.

Anyway, is there a way to unmount it, so I can move the drives to dedicated sata ports, let them all detect ok, and then reactivate the array without a resync? I know if I move to another PC they will all show up as foregin and when I import the array it usually seemed to start working without a resync.

Richard rich.ms

JWR

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#1328470 20-Jun-2015 19:59

Does 'Administrative Tools' --> 'Computer Management' -- > 'Disk Management' -- > Right Click (in red box(ish) area) -- > Option 'Offline' ... work?

richms

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#1328479 20-Jun-2015 20:19

I will give that a shot Monday. Not got enough sata cables that I trust at the moment.

edit.

Tried it on a small raid 5 and it just took one drive out of the array making it immediately go to failed redundancy. This one is luckily an old one of some 500 gig drives so wont take too long to resync back to working.

Richard rich.ms

JWR

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#1328503 20-Jun-2015 22:58

richms: I will give that a shot Monday. Not got enough sata cables that I trust at the moment.

edit.

Tried it on a small raid 5 and it just took one drive out of the array making it immediately go to failed redundancy. This one is luckily an old one of some 500 gig drives so wont take too long to resync back to working.

I haven't played around with software RAID 5 for a long time - around Windows 2000 Server, I think. :(

It was pretty slow and easy to corrupt. Microsoft have pretty much replaced software RAID 5 with Storage Spaces now. I haven't played with RAID5/Parity in that either :). But, I do use stripe and mirror.

--

Could you 'offline' the array or did you just take a drive out ?

Just taking a drive out, would almost certainly corrupt it - if it was rebuilding at the time.

I think I might play around with it too. I have server (2012) with a few 300GB drives free.

Do you have a workable backup of your main data?

Also, how much data do you have?

lxsw20

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#1328505 20-Jun-2015 23:03

Yeah RAID5 is not recommended for arrays of that size. Due to rebuild time, and chance of failure in a rebuild.

JWR

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#1328506 20-Jun-2015 23:06

lxsw20: Yeah RAID5 is not recommended for arrays of that size. Due to rebuild time, and chance of failure in a rebuild.

RAID 5 is just not nice without a hardware controller and battery backup/static RAM. .. even then... best to have a good backup:)

richms

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#1328507 20-Jun-2015 23:07

Its just a movie and music collection. Really done so I can get a single decent volume size for them and protection of a whole drive failure. Individual files getting corrupted isn't a huge concern because bittorrent is the ultimate mirror of them ;)

Unless I can score a free 2012 licence this will probably be the end of the road for upgrades, as it does all I need it to and since its not on the internet or browsable will just keep using it after 2008 r2 goes end of support. By then perhaps there will be 20TB externals for cheap or who knows so planning that far ahead isnt really viable.

Richard rich.ms

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#1328520 20-Jun-2015 23:15

richms: Its just a movie and music collection. Really done so I can get a single decent volume size for them and protection of a whole drive failure. Individual files getting corrupted isn't a huge concern because bittorrent is the ultimate mirror of them ;)

Unless I can score a free 2012 licence this will probably be the end of the road for upgrades, as it does all I need it to and since its not on the internet or browsable will just keep using it after 2008 r2 goes end of support. By then perhaps there will be 20TB externals for cheap or who knows so planning that far ahead isnt really viable.

I understand exactly what you mean.

Personally, I store on a striped storage spaces volume and backup to a spanned volume on another PC.

Not ideal. But, it is difficult to store TBs:)

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JWR

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#1328526 20-Jun-2015 23:23

Unless I can score a free 2012 licence this will probably be the end of the road for upgrades, as it does all I need it to and since its not on the internet or browsable will just keep using it after 2008 r2 goes end of support. By then perhaps there will be 20TB externals for cheap or who knows so planning that far ahead isnt really viable.

You have few years left for 2008. 2003 has just gone 'end of support'.

How much actual data do you have ?

richms

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#1328527 20-Jun-2015 23:28

There is about 10TB on that array. But that includes things like a 4th copy of photos and stuff like that. Probably only 8 of media. Would have to properties on folders and that takes an eternity.

Richard rich.ms

JWR

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#1328530 20-Jun-2015 23:47

richms: There is about 10TB on that array. But that includes things like a 4th copy of photos and stuff like that. Probably only 8 of media. Would have to properties on folders and that takes an eternity.

Hmm. So technically you have enough total disk to mirror everything and make a backup.

Of course with RAID 5 - you can only lose one disk.

Can you compress much of the data?

andrewNZ

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#1328531 20-Jun-2015 23:49

How about Stablebit Drivepool? Create a pool from any number of any size disks and present them as one drive. It's very resilient and rock solid in my experience.

It's not RAID. It only does duplication not parity (which is good IMO). Add Stablebit Scanner and of it detects a disk failing it can evacuate it automatically.

richms

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#1328532 20-Jun-2015 23:50

No, its mainly flac and mkvs for the media, Not really wanting to change how it is stored at the moment. If I do change it I will get a new machine etc and then copy it across to it.

Richard rich.ms

JWR

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#1328543 21-Jun-2015 00:45

richms: No, its mainly flac and mkvs for the media, Not really wanting to change how it is stored at the moment. If I do change it I will get a new machine etc and then copy it across to it.

Flac and mkv the best anyway IMO.