RAID 5 - failing boot drive


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I have a new client that has an HP ProLiant ML350 G6.

The computer has 6x 300GB 10K SAS drives in a RAID 5 array. 

 

One drive is doing a ton of thrashing and is incredibly loud. I mean, ridiculous. Its very worrysome, and its the first thing I noticed. I asked if the old company had ever said anything about it - nope.

 

I have a replacement on the way, but since the ORCA utility thinks this drive is the 'boot' for the array, I don't know if I can just swap the drives, add the new one to the array, remove the old one, and call it a day or not. I just don't have enough experience with the HP setup for this to be sure and obviously I can't blow their crap out of the water. 

 

The question is - can I just swap the drives, hit rebuild, and when its done set the new drive to be the boot drive?

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FIRST AND FOREMOST! Backups! is there any??

 

if yes then go check the HP SMH (system manage homepage); if it is updated (most likely not) then you can see the RAID configuration and every single error/warning in there. If that drive is truly faulty then you can see what array it belongs; usually you can hot swap and the array controler will imediatly start a rebuild.

 

but before that...what is the state of the backups?

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To me its a mistake to configure the system with just 1 raid 5 disk as both OS/Boot and storage. But that is a discussion for another time, I agree with Praetor - first point of business should be backup status.

Raid be it 1, 5, 6, 10 whatever is not a backup..

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Working on backups now - they had a Drobo just doing file backups which the old company took away.

 

I have an online backup running, an external, and I'm working on getting a full bare metal as we speak. 

 

I agree one RAID for both is stupid, but it wasn't my doing. Especially RAID 5, I would have never done that.

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To me its a mistake to configure the system with just 1 raid 5 disk as both OS/Boot and storage. But that is a discussion for another time, I agree with Praetor - first point of business should be backup status.

Raid be it 1, 5, 6, 10 whatever is not a backup..

 

35592_1245824899444_full.jpg

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Working on backups now - they had a Drobo just doing file backups which the old company took away.

 

I have an online backup running, an external, and I'm working on getting a full bare metal as we speak. 

 

I agree one RAID for both is stupid, but it wasn't my doing. Especially RAID 5, I would have never done that.

 

 

good that there is backups now, but the previous IT were completely unprofessional for not warning the costumer, if that is true...

HP RAID cards are pretty good, having worked with them along the years, so you can just remove the bad disk, insert a new one and watch the rebuild taking place. does the server has the SMH or the ACU software installed? If not then don't installed yet, let there be backups so you can take the necessery steps.

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good that there is backups now, but the previous IT were completely unprofessional for not warning the costumer, if that is true...

HP RAID cards are pretty good, having worked with them along the years, so you can just remove the bad disk, insert a new one and watch the rebuild taking place. does the server has the SMH or the ACU software installed? If not then don't installed yet, let there be backups so you can take the necessery steps.

 

No - neither of them are on there. I was planning on bringing the SmartStart CD and booting from that.

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No - neither of them are on there. I was planning on bringing the SmartStart CD and booting from that.

 

you can just go to the HP site and download the latest versions of them. Install all the necessary agents as well, but for now just install SMH and ACU so you can see how the rebuild will go and to see other errors/warnings. Also you can see if the RAID controler has any BBW or RAM; that is pretty critical for accelerating all the operations the cards does.

 

Your configuration should be like this:

HPSMH-8.png

 

Except that in this image the Version Control Agent is blue because is gathering data from the server (all the software/firmware components and it's versions), because it should be green. And if you have more HP servers you can setup a offline repository just for this updates, like a WSUS. :) It's pretty good.

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