Just Pull the Drive
By Bob Plankers on Jul 11, 2007 in Featured, System Administration
I don’t know about other hardware, but on Dell PowerEdge servers the best way to fix a dead drive is just to pull it out and put a new one in while everything is up and running.
It’s blissfully simple. Walk up to the box, pull the drive, put a new one in, and wait until the status light turns green. I walk away after the whole array starts blinking as it rebuilds the missing disk.
Every time, and I really mean every time I’ve seen someone try to use the Windows or Linux-based RAID controller software to help them replace a disk they’ve ended up either needing to power cycle the whole machine or doing something dumb. Dumb, like mirroring the new, blank drive back over the good drive. Every time I try to use the software it can’t be installed, doesn’t work right, or has such a horrible interface (GUI or CLI) that I fear that I will do something dumb.
Maybe this is all a real bad idea (leave me a comment if you think so), but I figure it’s called “hot swappable” for a reason. Why risk human error when the RAID controller knows the score, and can take care of itself so much better than I can take care of it?
4 Comment(s)
By nickyp on Jul 11, 2007 | Reply
Don’t forget to try to just pull out the drive, and stick it back in!
I’ve seen the controller rebuild the same drive that way, and a year later they’re still running without a problem.
Had to do this on a pe2850 with a RAID-5 array and a couple of pe1850 with RAID-1 arrays for a grand total of 4 drives ;-(
I think they sometimes arrive with an ‘almost unplugged’ drive and the vibrations gets to them after a while…
By Bob Plankers on Jul 11, 2007 | Reply
Yeah, good point. I had a machine in Chicago lose a drive, and the day before I was going to go down there to service it it lost power. Came back up fine, and remirrored the disks. Hmmm. It is an 1850, too.
I was looking for an excuse to head to Chicago for a day, though. :-)
By aharden on Jul 11, 2007 | Reply
I’ve supported Compaq/HP Proliants since ’98 and Dells since the 4th generation PowerEdges. I’ve had confidence in the Proliant Smart Array controllers’ auto-rebuild abilities for a much longer time than the Dells. Dell’s penchant for changing RAID controller OEMs with almost every generation (and subsequently alienating toolsets and cross-generational array compatibility) hasn’t sat well with me. However, the PERC/4′s and up seem to auto-rebuild OK.
By smpbhio@mail.com on Sep 10, 2007 | Reply
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