John,
If memory serves me, the NCR controllers are OEM'd by LSI (Metastor).
The RAID parity computation and rebuild should be handled by the
external array. Your host only sees what it thinks are disks, attached
however (fibre / SCSI)... it makes no difference. Your creating LUN's on
the array and presenting these to the host. It only knows disk.
The rebuild will be completely transparent to the host, so pull away!
CAUTION however - IF you've got production data on this array, you WILL
be running exposed while a re-build takes place. Depending on the size
drives and the priority established for the rebuild, this can take
awhile (I've seen 73GB drives take 18+ hours on a busy system). Should a
second drive truly fail, you will loose the entire RAID set unless the
rebuild is finished.
As opposed to simply pulling the drive to impress your boss, why not ask
your boss why he needs to be impressed. Take that answer back to your
storage vendor and let them prove it. That way if anything goes wrong,
its not your butt.
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Westerdale, John
Sent: Monday, December 17, 2001 9:11 PM
To: linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Pulling disk out of the RAID 5 Array?
Hello all!
Am tasked with proving the RAID-5 recovery strategy!
Have a Dual PII-400/ with external array (compaq storage F2) connected
via two ncr53C875 controllers... Box does OK! 8X9-GB drives provide 63
usable GB, and has been behaving itself for the past week or so.
My Boss wants to pull out a drive, and put an unformatted one in and see
how it rebuilds!
A realistic test for the dark day.... The external drive is all data. OS
is inside... (does this matte?)
Anything to watch out for when rebuilding is underway? Can I adjust
/etc/raidtab to rebuild faster? How does XFS compare to rebuilds on
other file systems?!?!
My last question was great!!! thanks for the responses... Seems the 2 GB
limit is in software settings and history more than programming
techniques.. Cant we all just do > 2 GB ?
THanks a Bunch!!!
JDW
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