RAID Question

[Bluetooth]

Hi Guys

 

Quick bit of background on the issue im having:

 

2 weeks ago one of the 2 hard drives on our server failed, normally not a problem, bob in a new drive and rebuild the raid right? well we purchased a replacement drive from HP and begun the rebuild, unfortunately the drive fails to rebuild on 3%

 

After much tooing and frooing with HP, they have come to the conclusion that the raid controller on the motherboard is on the fritz and as such we need to replace the board.

 

My question is thus:

 

If i purchase a third party PCI raid controller card, place this in the server, take our original drive that has the data and raid on it, and connect it to the new controller, will this controller then detect the raid and that is it degraded and then allow me to add a new spare and rebuild the drive?

 

I am not great with RAID so i thought i would ask those who are in the know

 

Thanks all.

 

B

[twin--turbo]

I would only ever begin to trust an identical controller to rebuild a raid from a failed controller.

 

Rob

[pete]

Not a good idea.

 

Even if you get it to work (by picking a card with the same chipset as onboard with compatible firmware), you've then got to make the resulting RAID volume play nicely with the chipset on the replacement motherboard.

 

If it's under warranty, HP (or whoever's doing their parts swapping in your neck of the woods) should turn up next day to swap the motherboard.

[Duke]

I would only ever begin to trust an identical controller to rebuild a raid from a failed controller.

 

+1 on that. At a minimum, get a card from the same manufacturer and in the same series as the one you're replacing.

 

You really need to speak to your current RAID card manufacturer to see what the deal is, as some cards store RAID information on the card and some store it on the disk. If your old and new card both store it on the disk in the same way then you might be okay. If the new one stores it on card and old one stored it on disk then the new card might not like the disks. If they old one stored it on card and the new one stores it on the disks then it might not detect the array disks at all and ask you to initialise them.

 

Best option if the manufacturer can't swap the card and guarantee it'll work? Back up your data, make a new array with the new card, then restore your data.

 

Chris

[twin--turbo]

Good old Dell PERC's ( the AMI / LSI ones not the dreadful adaptec ones ) Would tell you if the controller mismatched the disks and give you a choice of what to do.

 

Make sure you have everything backed up before you begin, and it may be worth considering doing a P2V virtualisation.

 

Rob

[sted]

id be vary wary of even replacing one raid controller with an identical one. Personally id do a full backup with something like ghost or disk to vhd then recreate the raid array then if worst comes to it you can junk the array and just restore over the top with ghost\imagex /apply

[Bluetooth]

Thanks all for the input

 

The board is a HP board and i have been told to contact an authorized repairer to get the board and such. chances are, depending on cost i will just get a new server and image the server

 

thanks all again i love edugeek =-)