Yet another RAID Question (YARQ)

[Steve Bertrand]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org 
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org] On Behalf Of P.U.Kruppa
> Sent: Monday, June 20, 2005 9:28 AM
> To: Ted Mittelstaedt
> Cc: P.U.Kruppa; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: RE: Yet another RAID Question (YARQ)
> 
> On Mon, 20 Jun 2005, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> 
> >> On Sun, 19 Jun 2005, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> >>
> >>>
> >>> What model of Proliant?
> >> ML 350 G4
> >>
> >
> > Oh good, we have a customer that has been looking at one of 
> these for 
> > FreeBSD and I'm glad to hear that you didn't have problems with it.
> Absolutely smooth - and I am really no kind of computer expert.
> 
> > With these all you get is hot-swap support although you 
> might have to 
> > do a camcontrol rescan after swapping the disk.
> Yes, I have read that in some recent thread.
> 
> > Actually, the Windows management tools for this raid 
> controller on a 
> > server are observational as well.  There is no rebuild tool or 
> > anything like that.
> > When we set these systems up
> > for customers (All the recent Proliants use the same RAID 
> controller) 
> > we usually configure them RAID-5 with 4 physical disks, the 
> setup will 
> > set 3 of the disks in the array, and one a hot-spare.  And in the 
> > event of a disk failure, which you can tell by looking at the disk 
> > drive lights, or going into the management interface, you 
> simply pull 
> > out the bad disk and put in the replacement and the RAID card takes 
> > care of the rest of it.
> The City of Wuppertal couldn't buy me a third disc, because 
> that would have superceded the limit of 2.5 kEURO, which 
> would have required some special administrative act ... :-) .
> 
> > As for knowing if a disk has failed,
> > I think the only way to know is to watch the little lights 
> on the disk 
> > front.
> After reading Alex' story about running a RAID 1 with a 
> defect disc for three years, I believe it will suffice, when 
> I check things with every system upgrade.

I know this technique isn't feasable in all situations, but I try to
have duplicate hardware. Especially with my IDE RAID1 servers, I'll from
time to time during a maintenance window pop one of the RAID disks out,
throw it in another box and ensure BOTH machines boot up with individual
disks.

This is a sure test to ensure RAID is working. Mind you, I also back up
using rsync for critical stuff to another box, and to tape as well.

Steve

> 
> Uli.
> 
> 
> *********************************************
> * Peter Ulrich Kruppa - Wuppertal - Germany *
> *********************************************
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