On 20 Dec 2007, at 07:31, Steve Dommett wrote:
On Thursday 20 December 2007, Stroller wrote:
I maintain a few Poweredges, I think mostly 2950. Just yesterday
we swapped a
drive on the Fusion MPT SAS controller. We were prompted to take
the drive
out of service by an email from 'smartd'...
After failing and removing the drive from the array using 'mdadm',
we tried
hotswapping the drive, and whilst nothing untoward happened when we
pulled
the drive there were no kernel messages either. ... We had to
reboot the server to get it to see the replacement drive.
Funnily enough, I've experienced something similar on this 2800 of
ours the last couple of days, also a prefailure. This machine is
running Windows, and the new drive was recognised in OpenManage
Server Administrator <https://localhost:1311> but despite it showing
exactly the same size (68.24gig) as the other two already installed
(as RAID1) when I tried to assign it as global hot-spare I got
directed to a message saying that it was insufficient to accommodate
all virtual disks.
The Dell tech support guy - who has been BRILLIANTLY helpful over a
simple failed drive, by the way - advised installing the latest
firmware updates. After rebooting the drive has been fine, and I was
able to allocate as hot-spare with a single click, although I guess I
can't say whether this is because of the updates or of just the
reboot. But the engineer also mentioned these updates, so multiple
sources concur, at least. The DRAC remote-administration unit also
seems much more responsive with the newer firmware.
... I was expecting something
similar to when I've hotplugged SATA drives on my desktop machine.
What controller is in that, please?
Does it do hardware RAID, or is it just a regular SATA controller?
I've been reading a little about hotplugging SATA recently, and as I
understand it hotplugging is a part of the SATA specification in a
way that it's not in EIDE (or even SCSI?). But what I read also
stated that SATA controllers are not _required_ to support hot-
plugging, either. This makes choosing an SATA more complicated, of
course - I can't hep thinking it's easiest to plump for a SATA
controller advertised to do hot-swap hardware RAID - I imagine this
might be better marketed than a regular SATA controller that happens
to support hot-swapping (but no RAID).
Due simply to the price of disks we'd tend to choose hot-plug SATA
RAID over hot-plug SCSI, if were to buy new.
Stroller.
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