Perc 5i RAID 5 question??????

[runnin17]

Okay, so I wake up this morning and try to access my server disks that are run through my Perc 5. I have two RAID 5 arrarys (one 4x1TB arrary and one 4x2TB arrary).

The 4x1TB arrary shows one physical disc failure. Rebuilt that individual drive because I didn't think the drive had failed. That is now finished and the Perc 5 is reporting that array as "optimal".

HERE IS THE KICKER....
The 4x2TB arrary shows one failed physical disc and one missing physical disc. Well, again I don't think that the one disc has failed and I know that the other "missing" disc is not missing. Any thoughts on how to go about fixing this second arrary????

Someone mention about spinning down the array in chat. I am not sure what "spinning down the array" means.

[mdh]

Someone mention about spinning down the array in chat. I am not sure what "spinning down the array" means.

Power down the disks/disk array, check all cables, terminators etc, then spin em up and reprobe.

This is in the hope that all disks come back online and it was possibly a spurious scsi bus error, bad cable connection or some other randomness.

Odds are though even if it all spins up nice with 2 disks being reported down the controller isn't gonna like your raid pack... sometimes you get lucky though ...

[runnin17]

yeah, I spun it all down and checked all the cables and such. Still was showing the same thing. Luckily nothing too important was on that array. I can get it all back via backup drives.

I forced the one drive that was showing "failed" back online and then the array displayed as "degraded". It booted up fine, but as I started accessing the files the MegaRAID software displayed that the drive I forced to come back online failed again.

As far as the missing drive, I told the software to "replace missing drive" and it is currently in the process of being rebuilt. Will take a long time. If that is successful I will backup all the data I can and then check each of the drives for any faults. I have a feeling that one of the drives just is about to die. This array is made with 4 WD "green" drives. So that probably tells me I need to fork over the cash and buy some Samsung F4's to replace these WD drives and just use the WD for backup duty and not for RAID duty.

I will update the thread when the rebuild finishes.

[mpolter]

Well from the looks of it, you are doing everything I would do. Hope to hell everything rebuilds. You might want to consider raid6 in the future (2 parity drives) or 2 copies of the data. I have a raid6 that I back the important info up to a second volume with a mirrored pair.

For those really paranoid backup your important shit to clouddrive or ec2 as well. Depends on how important your data is.

--MikeP

[runnin17]

Currently in the rebuild process. Looks like it has about 9 or so hours left. This should give me a good reason to pickup some more hard drives :D

[ricko]

Those WD green drives took about a year of my life when trying to get them to play nice in one of my RAID5 stacks.

If you decide to get a few more drives I would suggest a RE drive or at least one that supports TLER. Not all greenies have TLER support.

Just my $0.02, good luck

[Baleful]

We install backup devices at work that use the WD RE drives. I would say we have around 400 of those drives in operation across all of our clients. From what I've seen over the past 6 months, they have about a 10% failure rate in high production environments.

Personally, I've had really bad luck with both Seagate and WD Blacks/RE's. I've been using nothing but Samsung F3/4's for the past year with really good luck.

Hope everything works out for you man.

[jacobroufa]

Personally, I've had really bad luck with both Seagate and WD Blacks/RE's. I've been using nothing but Samsung F3/4's for the past year with really good luck.

Hope everything works out for you man.

This. Every WD drive I've owned, save my Passport externals, has died thrashing horrible deaths. Since I've stuck with Samsung F-series I've had nothing but good things.

Good luck runnin! Hope you don't lose anything!

[runnin17]

Well holy shit :D Looks like all the drives rebuilt just fine. Funny thing is after all the drives were rebuilt I was still getting some access errors in Windows. Accidentally did a hard restart and then during reboot got prompted to do a consistency check on the 4x2tb logical drive.

Let windows do its thing and it took about 2.5 hours, but it fixed all the file indexing issues and all the data appears to be intact. Gonna run through a few things first before I feel secure that everything is up and running, but so far so good.

I am actually very, very pleasantly surprised that I was able to recover everything.

In the end I still need to upgrade my 4x1tb array to a 4x2tb array with Samsung F4's. Hell, I might do that to the current WD green drives too and just pick up 8 Samsung F4's.