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donaldfung

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20 years ago

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donaldfung

7 Posts

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2518

January 15th, 2007 07:00

Addition disk for backup using in RAID 1 config in PE2850 & 1850

We have a PE2850 (PERC 4e/Di) and PE1850 (PERC 4e/Si) system. They are currently running in RAID 1.

Initially, we used external hard disk enclosure(USB) with ghost to backup.
But the speed is slow(the size are 146GB) and requires to shutdown the system.

We are now considering to add an additional hard disk as a recovery disk and let the system to rebuild the image.

Can we just pull and replace one of the hard disk during running?
And any procedure need to be done before changing the disk?

Thanks.
  • P

    pcmeiners

    6 Operator

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    1771 Posts

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    Posted January 15th, 2007 17:00

    Do you realize the odds of failure of two disks in a raid 1, within a short period time (say two weeks) are near astronomical.
     
    If the main idea is a backup for catastrophic loss as in tornado, hurricane, fire, theft, or a bad patch or software install,  then place a new disk as a hotspare, if your running off an SCA backplane. You will be able to remove one of the original disks, the hot spare will kick in and  rebuild. The "pulled" disk is  a full backup of the original raid 1. 
     
    If you do not have room for a hotspare drive, just pull one of the drives, (after there is no users on the sysytem) and replace it with a new drive. The replacement drive will rebuild in a relatively short period of time. Refer to the following
     
     
     
  • M

    Mark_A_Smith

    2 Intern

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    827 Posts

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    Posted January 15th, 2007 18:00

    The optimal way to fail a drive is to use the Server Administrator utility.  You can use this to force a drive offline (fail it) and you will not have to physically remove the drive.  This is the only clean way that Dell supports failing a drive that is online and running.
     
    NOTE: the backplanes in these servers are fairly sturdy, but frequent removal and insertion of a drive in the backplane WILL cause it to fail at some point.

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