How to Change a damaged Disk in a Raid 5 array

hard driveraidraid5

I have a server with a 4-drives Raid 5 array; one of the disks is damaged. All the disks are hot pluggable. My Question is, I want to replace the damaged disk with a new one, do I have to shutdown the server or should I just change the hard disk with the server on and it will rebuild the array? There is a procedure to follow? My Server is a HP.

Regards.

Best Answer

If the disks are hot-swappable, you should be able to just swap the damaged disk with a new one of the same type, size and speed; the RAID array should be automatically rebuilt by the controller.

Howewer, if you can post the server and controller model, the full configuration of the controller and the operating system installed on the server, we could tell you better.

Related Solutions

Is it possible to construct a RAID 5 array from an existing disk

It depends on your RAID controller, but most likely it won't support that. It would have to move all the data around to lay it out in a clean way.

You best bet is to either be patient and wait for the other drives, or buy a 4th drive and then you'll have a spare for later.

If you buy a 4th, then you'll install on the one you have now, and then migrate the install over to the RAID once the other drives come in, using something simple like dd. Then that initial disk will be your spare.

Remove 1 Disk From 4 Disk RAID 5 Array

No, and if you have 4 disks and want two spares you are better off performance wise with a 4 disk RAID 10 instead of a 3 disk RAID 5 + hot spare. Either way your array will have 2 disks worth of usable capacity but the RAID 10 will have better write speeds and takes less time to recover from a failed disk.

Assuming the RAID 5 doesn't contain your boot volume, I'd go ahead and backup the data, reconfigure to a RAID 10, and restore the data.

    RAID Level Comparison for arrays up to 8 drives.
Features                RAID 0  RAID 1   RAID 5   RAID 6   RAID 10
Min Drives                2       2        3        4        4
Data Protection           0       1        1        2        2 (Up to one disk failure in each sub-array)
Read Performance         High    High     High     High     High
Write Performance        High   Medium    Low      Low     Medium
Degraded Read Perf       N/A    Medium    Low      Low      High
Degraded Write Perf      N/A     High     Low      Low      High
Capacity Utilization %   100     50      67-87    50-75     50

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Is it possible to construct a RAID 5 array from an existing disk

Remove 1 Disk From 4 Disk RAID 5 Array

Related Topic