You may have a spare (replacement) drive whose size in sectors is slightly less than the original drive.
What operating system are you using? We can look at the hpacucli
output to determine this for sure.
I will update this answer once we get more information.
Edit:
See my answer on: Smart Array P400i Physical Drive failed after being replaced for the tool download link for Windows 2008...
I'm specifically looking for the output of ctrl all show config
.
Edit:
Now that I've seen your hpacucli
output, you're in an incredibly rare situation.
logicaldrive 1 (68.5 GB, RAID 1, Interim Recovery Mode)
physicaldrive 2I:1:1 (port 2I:box 1:bay 1, SAS, 73.5 GB, OK)
physicaldrive 2I:1:2 (port 2I:box 1:bay 2, SAS, 72 GB, Failed
Your original 72GB drives were actually larger than 72GB. As you can see, your healthy disk is a 73.5GB disk. HP changes disk manufacturers during the product lifetime, keeping the same spare part numbers. In this case, the replacement sent to you is a true 72GB drive. The rebuild would definitely not work.
The only thing that can fix this one is an equal or larger-size physical drive. Simply send this output to HP and ask for a 146GB disk if you're under warranty. If you're not under warranty, just get a 146GB disk and it'll rebuild as a "68.5 GB" RAID-1 member.
Also, ask for a 10k RPM 146GB disk. Your old 72GB disk is a 10k RPM (which was discontinued in that capacity LONG ago). The HP replacement is a 15k RPM drive.
I suspect your Supermicros are broken one way or the other - possibly the battery packs are overheating. Most recent LSIs would report the temperature through MegaCLI - you might want to monitor this value on servers which needed replacement.
root@host:~/SOLARIS# ./MegaCli -AdpBbuCmd -GetBbuStatus -aALL
BBU status for Adapter: 0
BatteryType: BBU
[...]
Temperature: 41 C
I have seen a couple of Dell and Fujitsu systems with LSI BBU controllers, none of them had yearly battery pack replacement (except you screwed the pack up by deep-discharge). The typical life time has been around 3 to 5 years.
Best Answer
FBWC is the only option for modern HP controllers. BBWC is not offered anymore.
There is very little practical use for the Zero-memory controller unless local disk performance isn't important to you.
Otherwise, you will always want to have a cache available... this is necessary for some of the RAID controller options and being able to use SSDs.