DELL RAID ARRAY FAILURE

[drrank]

Hello, i have a pretty bad problem in my prime Server,

One of the hard drives is Beeping a lot,

and i have this message on the windows desktop.

PERC 4/5 C Controller 0, Array Disk 0:2 Failed,

What can i do to solve this? Why this happen?? the server is in a cold room and is connected to a SAI

Thanks in advance

Sergi

 

[drrank]

My Raid system is RAID 5,

one of the arrays has failures
i start a check consistenci on raid and failed
i start a rebuild on the degraded array and fail

i think i have no choice but to change the hard drive,

Are there any safe methods for replacing the drive, i have never changed a hard drive in a RAID

Thanks in advance

Sergi

 

[LawnBoy]

Just pull out the bad drive (which would be the third drive in the array) and put in a replacement. The array should rebuild itself, may take several hours.

 

[drrank]

Thank you Lawnboy,

Only one question more, the hard drive can be greater than the broken one, or must be of the same size.

Also the hard drive must be ATA, or can be SCSI or IDE,

Thanks in advance

Sergi

 

[TheLad]

Usually if you use a replacement that is a bigger hard drive, it will work but you cannot utilise the extra diskspace unless you replace all of the hard disks with bigger drives.

Just make sure that your server is capable of taking (or compatible with) the bigger size disk.

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"Insert funny comment in here!"
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[NickFerrar]

The drive must be of the same type as the other array drives (e.g. if you're taking out a SCSI drive replace it with a SCSI drive) but the replacement drive can be bigger. Also make sure the replacement drive is the same or faster spindle speed (i.e. if your current disks are 15k rpm don't put a 10k rpm replacement drive in else you'll slow down the whole array to 10k rpm).

It sounds like your drive has indeed failed although a final test (and one Dell always ask you to do in a warranty situation) is to remove the faulty drive and put it back in, this both reseats the drive and should trigger a rebuild attempt. I have had this work for me on a few occassions so worth doing.

 

[drrank]

Thanks TheLad and NickFerrar,

I will try to remove the drive and put it back later when the users stop sending requests to the server.

Thank you for your advices

Sergi