I have a Dell T710, coming with PERC 6/i RAID controller. The current raid has 2×500 GB hard drives (with the OS), and 6×1000 GB hard drives (in RAID-6, currently empty). I would like to take one 1000 GB disk physically out to keep as an immediate spare in case of a crash, and configure the remaining 5×1000 GB in a single VD RAID-6.
This is all nice and clean and works, until I realized that the display on the machine reports the lack of the 8th disk as an error. It's marked as error, but appears to be a warning, since the machine is fully functional.
My question is: what is the best way to keep one disk as a spare out of the array? should I disassemble the disk from the cradle and insert the empty cradle in the array ? Or should I just silence the error in the display in some way (how?). I know that what I am doing sounds pretty strange, but here is academia and having a spare disk available could take weeks. Better to have one ready in my drawer for any emergency.
Best Answer
Putting that spare disk in your drawer doesn't make too much sense. Instead, leave it in the server and mark it as a hot spare. Instructions here. Then, you'll have a OS mirror and a RAID5 array for data and if any of those disks fails, the controller will automatically rebuild with the hot spare.
As for why you are getting an error about the last disk, you'll have to provide more detail. What is the error? Have you already rebuilt all of the RAID sets so that disk is not currently configured in a RAID set?