techyphil Posted June 6, 2007 Posted June 6, 2007 I think its called HotSwapping or HotPlugnPLay but... Every holiday for the past year as we leave the office on the friday before the kids come back, 1 of the SCSI drives on a server will have a red light. Weird ey? Anyways... we order a new drive and usually we shutdown the system about 4ish - turn it all off and swap the drives. Recently there have been alot of system shutdowns due to sims upgrades and so tonight I want to see if Hotswapping really works. HP said its possible for it to rebuild the raid array whilst its still on. Many other companies have said the same thing. Any of your guys done it before?
plexer Posted June 6, 2007 Posted June 6, 2007 If the raid enclosure is a hot swap one which it should be if the drives are available from the front of the machine then yes you pull out the faulty one and put in the new one speed of access to the array will be reduced while it rebuilds and uses the new drive but that's all. But if you are constantly having to do this then thats not right and further investigation is required. Ben
timbo343 Posted June 6, 2007 Posted June 6, 2007 Yeah, ive replaced all our over 3 year hotswap drives. Our servers are configured with Raid 5 over 4 drives one of them been a hot swap, basically just pull it out while the server is still on, the raid will begin to rebuild on the spare drive. Once the new drive is put in the spare drive will go back to been a spare and raid will rebuild the new drive...if that makes sense.
plexer Posted June 6, 2007 Posted June 6, 2007 One of them would be a hot spare then not a hot swap hot swapping is the act of changing a drive while the system is live. Ben
techyphil Posted June 6, 2007 Author Posted June 6, 2007 thanks pletor and timbo. Basically theres 5 drives, initially 3 but we added 2. As I understand it the guy said should one particular drive go down then the entire RAID data will be lost?
Geoff Posted June 6, 2007 Posted June 6, 2007 Hot Swapping works fine in RAID 1 or RAID 5 configurations. Assuming your server chassis supports it.
bossman Posted June 6, 2007 Posted June 6, 2007 Saved our bacon on RAID 5 and has been very stable since.
plexer Posted June 6, 2007 Posted June 6, 2007 With RAID5 you can lose one disk and still be ok if you lose 2 then the array is toast. Ben
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