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In Reply to: Re: RAID Array ? posted by AbeCollins on May 11, 2007 at 09:37:49:
Yeah, I know. I'm wondering if it's going to fail again soon and then should I replace all the drives. The server is about 3 years old, so I'd expect it'd be fine for another year or two before we need to consider replacing it to avoid failures.Now, I'm wondering if I should reconfigure the new server. It's a Dell 2850 with split backplane and 6 drives. Two 73GB drives are configured for the system in a mirrored configuration. The data is on a four disk RAID 5 configuration with 300GB drives. I could change that to use 3 drives and set up on as a hot spare. We'd lose 200GB or so of storage, but that's not really an issue as I've got 700GB free now. The downside it that it'd take a few days to rebuild, but I've got time now before we go live on it.
Follow Ups:
I recommend upgrading the firmware on the hard drives. I have a couple of 2850's in my shop and have experienced the same problem.Assuming you have the Maxtor 73GB 10K drives (there is a different update for the 15K drives):
"Under certain circumstances a hard disk drive may go offline, hard disk drives (HDD), may report offline due to a timeout condition. If the HDD is unable to complete commands, this may result in the controller reporting the HDD off line due to a timeout condition.
Higher than expected failures rates have been reported on the Maxtor Atlas 10K V ULD (unleaded or lead free) SCSI hard disk drives.
If the hard disk drive (HDD) is unable to complete commands, this may result in the controller reporting the HDD offline due to the timeout condition. The primary failure modes have been the HDD failing to successfully rebuild and also failing after a rebuild has completed.
For all ULD part numbers/model numbers listed below, Dell considers this as an "Urgent Update" and recommends proactively updating the firmware to avoid interruptions.
YC951 – Model ATLAS10K5_73WLS - 73GB 10K 68 pin
CD807 – Model ATLAS10K5_146WLS - 146GB 10K 68 pin
FD456 – Model ATLAS10K5_300WLS - 300GB 10K 68 pin
GD084 – Model ATLAS10K5_73SCA - 73GB 10K 80 pin
YC952 – Model ATLAS10K5_146SCA - 146GB 10K 80 pin
CD808 – Model ATLAS10K5_300SCA - 300GB 10K 80 pinThe following leaded part numbers/model numbers can also benefit by having the JT00 revision of the firmware installed but is considered as a "Recommended Update" rather than "Urgent" as listed for the unleaded models.
T4350 – Model ATLAS10K5_73WLS - 73GB 10K 68 pin
U4006 – Model ATLAS10K5_146WLS - 146GB 10K 68 pin
R4784 – Model ATLAS10K5_300WLS - 300GB 10K 68 pin
CC315 – Model ATLAS10K5_73SCA - 73GB 10K 80 pin
FC271 – Model ATLAS10K5_146SCA - 146GB 10K 80 pin
CC317 – Model ATLAS10K5_300SCA - 300GB 10K 80 pin"As always, make sure you have a current backup first.
I use the Dell 2850 and 2950's (plus a pile of older Poweredge 4600s and a few other models) a lot in the systems that I administer at the college, Rod. They're very good machines.You've got what Dell terms a "RAID 1 + 5" configuration (OS on RAID 1, data on RAID 5), which I've been using very successfully on several dozen servers over some five years now. If you stay with that, the only change I would make would be to add a hot spare (extra HD, online and configured to be available for automatic failover) to your array, so that one additional HD is always there. If you're talking real fault tolerance, I assume that you've got Dell's redundant power supplies, ECC RAM, etc., etc. You know that score...
300GB SAS HD's are the minimum that I would use for your application.
RAID 6 is interesting, but still young...and it does have some costs as well as some benefits. (See link below for more.) I'd wait until Dell integrated it...don't remember seeing it as an option on any of my recent Dell Premier site server building systems.
Best wishes to you with the upgrade project. Believe me, I know what's involved in a decision like this....
david
Yeah. I looked at the RAID 6 and while it's interesting, the controller doesn't know anything about it, just 1 or 5.We've also been quite happy with the Dell servers. Our first was a 1300 when the Asylum first started and then we moved to a 2450 and added a 2550, then some 2650s and finally the 2850. I decided to bite the bullet and reconfigure the new one. That was fun! Remind how much I love UNIX.
So now I've got three of the 300GB drives in RAID 5 with the fouth as a hot swap drive. I haven't messed with the RAID controllers much, this one is an LSI controller, Perc 4 something. Anyway, I selected the hot swap drive when I defined the logical drive, so will the controller know to use it automatically? I'm running FreeBSD, so the OS doesn't know anything about the RAID configuration.
-Rod
You could also keep a cold spare on hand. If you disconnect the system from the 'net while rebuilding the array then having a hot spare will make little difference other than to relieve you of having to plug in the new drive.But if your system starts dropping drives that are actually good, then it may be a faulty RAID controller. I'm guessing you don't have a spare controller on hand. If that's the case and you lose the controller, all you can do is wait for Fedex to show up with a replacement.
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