All my firmware is up to date on the server and the controllers.
Storage crashed over the weekend. I rebooted it and it detected that I put in two new disks last week (I did check that both disk completed the rebuilding process last week). After it booted into the OS I see that it gave me an information message. After 18 hours it is at 54% so it is looking healthy. But I need to replace 5 more disk in the msa. Should I wait for this message to finish before replacing more disks?
785 Background parity initialization is currently queued or in progress on Logical Drive 1 (15.0 TB, RAID 5). If background parity initialization is queued, it will start when I/O is performed on the drive. When background parity initialization completes, the performance of the logical drive will improve.
Best Answer
Oh boy.
You should really really learn about the technology you're using BEFORE trying to do maintenance/recovery on it.
RAID5 consists of one parity partition alligned over all disks, which means that you can lose 1 disk and still have data available, while rebuilding a new disk (which should be a hot spare). Remove another disk while this is happening and your data is potentially lost.
Second of all, you have a 15TB RAID5 set, which I'm pretty sure is 1TB S-ATA disks? You're looking at a long, long, long period of time if you're going to replace 5 more disks, as the raid will need to rebuild completely every time you replace 1 disk (and remember - 1 disk at a time, wait for rebuild, then another disk and so on).
This is not the normal way of doing things. If the SAN is so old that you need to replace all disks then a new SAN should be purchased to migrate data to.