server 2003 soft raid and 2 drives gone iffy...

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richms

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#27972 12-Nov-2008 22:00

Will ask here too since newsgroups are pretty much dead nowdays..

Its not completing a resync because of errors on the drives, there are 2 that are not working too good. It will come up and the stuff is accessable, and what I have looked at before the resync barfed is fine.

But I need to get the stuff onto a new array. It is 6 200 gig drives, raid 5 for about 980 gigs of usable space, and pretty full.

Anyway. If I was to identify the 2 dodgey drives, would I be able to clone them onto a new 1tb drive (using DD I guess) and will windows be smart enough to resync them, that is, will everything needed for it to recognize that the drives are the same be copied, or does it use something with the model and serial of the drive to ID it too?

Secondly, once clones to the new drives, there will be about 800 gigs on each unused. Can I put a new stripeset there and copy from the raid-5 into that stripe set so I can then delete the raid and expand the stripe set to the full 1tb of space on the 2 drives? - The idea of finding some spare 200 or 250 gig drives for the short time needed isn't very enticing.

The other option is I get a couple of laptop 250s since they seem to be reasonable value and I would have a use for them after the move to a new raid.

And another thing, how do I set it up to email me when a drive goes offline?

Richard rich.ms

rphenix

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#178941 19-Nov-2008 22:38

as long as the drive signatures are the same windows shouldnt care.

Regs

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#178944 19-Nov-2008 22:51

personally I would be looking at a raid card for running raid-5 rather than using the software raid solution. it may just end up being cheaper to buy 500GB/1TB drives and mirror them though :D

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richms

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#178965 20-Nov-2008 01:07

Had nothing but trouble with hardware raid cards in the past, when one died on me I had to scour the net for an identical replacement. Prefer the ease of software raid, performance is fine for just storing a crapload of files and I can use any sata controller I like.

I got it working again, after doing a test in seagates tools and it reported 3 of the drives as failing, and then doing it again and they all passed and its back to running fast and rebuilt all the way thru without error so I guess the failing sectors have being remapped and wont happen again.

I upgraded a friends HDD so now have a spare drive to use when another fails. I think I will be shifting to 1GB drives and just mirroring them, when I built the array 200 was the biggest without a stupid $/gig hit of the 320s which were the biggest, now that the $/gig is prettymuch constant across anything over 500g then I may as well just get a pair of 1.5tbs to move this onto and add drives in pairs as the needs arise.

I would like to put one drive in the house and one in the shed and mirror between them somehow but am still looking for a reliable way of doing that over ethernet. Got proper ethernet out there now so speed isnt an issue like it was with the shoddy powerline networking.

Richard rich.ms

rphenix

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#179000 20-Nov-2008 09:12

richms: Had nothing but trouble with hardware raid cards in the past, when one died on me I had to scour the net for an identical replacement. Prefer the ease of software raid, performance is fine for just storing a crapload of files and I can use any sata controller I like.

Interesting. I'm a big hardware raidcontroller fan although linux's software raid is very good windows is a bit mediocre. I think it depends on the brand of controller however. You need to do a lot of research and stay away from those half arsed fakeraid controllers (if its cheap its fakeraid general rule of thumb).

I quite like 3ware Raid controllers, generally work very well across different versions of windows and linux. Stick to a simlar series of the 3ware and I've never had a problem swapping a dead controller simple as plug it in, check the array is defined in the controller bios and away it goes (can do a slow check/verify later). I've also never had one die that wasnt related to being nuked by the motherboard (ie power issues).

People often get bad experiences with raid controllers when they are using something like an Adaptec 1210SA (which appears to be everywhere, and suffers all sorts of issues, my favourite is it's raid degrades under heavy load).

Nety

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#179018 20-Nov-2008 10:38

I agree that hardware raid is very dependant on what the hardware is.

I work in IT and deal with server raid arrays on a regular basis. My experiance is that they are damn near bullet proof and very smart with things like being able to take the disks out of one server put them in another server. Read the config of the disks and off you go again.
The other end of the scale is the Raid that comes on a lot of consumer mother boards now. It works and is fast but reliable... no!
I run RAID 0 on my home PC but only because I have home server backing it up everyday. It has crapped out on me three times now. Once because I loaded a old bios config (so you could at a stretch call it my own fault) but the other times it would just drop a disk out of the RAID and bye bye data

Media centre PC - Case Silverstone LC16M with 2 X 80mm AcoustiFan DustPROOF, MOBO Gigabyte MA785GT-UD3H, CPU AMD X2 240 under volted, RAM 4 Gig DDR3 1033, HDD 120Gig System/512Gig data, Tuners 2 X Hauppauge HVR-3000, 1 X HVR-2200, Video Palit GT 220, Sound Realtek 886A HD (onboard), Optical LiteOn DH-401S Blue-ray using TotalMedia Theatre Power Corsair VX Series, 450W ATX PSU OS Windows 7 x64