Of Hard Drives and RAID...

Some months ago, one of the two hard drives in the server at the office decided to up and quit. Although this is bad, we use a RAID 1 setup to minimize data loss. What this means is there, in our case, two identical hard drives in the server that are"mirrored" at any given time they both have all the same information. So, if one dies the server continues to operate.

The server is getting up there in age, but I am not ready to go to a new Server OS and you can throw all the power you want at Windows Server 2003 32bit and not see much in the way of performance gain for network-centric operations. So, I decided to upgrade the hard drives with a pair of new server-grade Seagate 500gb 7200.11 SATA drives. Mmmmmmmm a slight performance gain, a huge storage gain and cheap. While the server was down and I was under the hood, I decided to bump the RAM from 2gb to 4gb. Yeah, I know that it can't use all 4 gigs but it can use slightly more than 3GBs and it also was pretty cheap.

The upgrade went relatively without a hitch. I booted from a BartPE CD I have with my RAID driver floppy disc (yes, a real 3.5" floppy) and made an image of the partition. Then I installed the new drives, created the new Array and restored the image. It took about an hour.

But here we are a few months later and one of those new drives has failed. No big deal right? Well, it is when the RAID controller Docs don't discuss rebuilding the array. Now, don't get me wrong, this cheap SATA RAID controller has saved me alot of greif up until this point. But, REALLY?!? No docs on rebuilding?!? REALLY?!?

If you find yourself in a position that requires you to rebuild an array then keep this in mind. An OFFLINE RAID rebuild means that you will be rebuilding the array in the BIOS without the benefit of the OS, Internet, Solitaire, etc. So, if you have to rebuild an array and want to has access to all of those wonderful things that make computers worth having make sure you choose ONLINE rebuild.

All of that said, I don't trust it. Choosing an ONLINE rebuild with a cheap controller seems a bit like rolling the dice. Its an OFFLINE rebuild for me! So, I'm sitting back and checking my webmail periodically.

Cheers!