Rebuilding a RAID1 with a new drive

[marco.shaw]

Follow up to: https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2137000

Cisco UCS 2x0 system with a LSI 1064-based controller mezzanine card

I have a RAID1 setup with drive #1 and drive #2.  I shut down the server, pulled out drive #2, and inserted a brand new (never used before) drive #3.

Booted into the LSI BIOS, and failed to figure out how to set the drive #3 state so the RAID1 would rebuild/resynch.

Any ideas?

[Robert Burns]

Marco,

First - It's not a good idea to swap a failed disk while the server is powered off.  Doing so the controller may set the new disk offline or "inactive".  It's recommended to replace disks while the OS has been loaded or at least after the RAID controller option ROM has booted.

Second - Unless a RAID controller marks a disk as "bad" or "failed" it will normally not auto re-sync on a newly inserted drive.  For a replacement drive to even be accepted by the RAID controller it must be a fresh drive with NO previous RAID configuration on it.  Doing so will render the controller marking the disk as "foreig" and it will need to be manually imported into the array.

From the LSI BIOS with your DISK 3 you will have to likely import the disk into the array to kick off the re-sync.  I'll see if I can provide some screen shots from my lab system.

Regards,

Robert

[marco.shaw]

So that's the thing...  The disk isn't failed.  This is the backup strategy in place for some "very secure servers".  The client doesn't even want their corporate backup server in this case.

The backup strategy is to cycle through the drives every quarter (or after major changes) and store the disk in a highly secure area.

That's what they want...

[Robert Burns]

Hard to argue with "what the customer wants". 

If disk stability is the name of the game they should be looking at RAID6 or RAID10 which allow mulitple disk failures.  Along with a hot spare you'd have to have 3 disks fail within a very short period...

If they require more protection than that - they should be looking at NAS/SAN.

Just my 2 cents

Robert