RAID-5 Is Dell BSing me?
Hi,
I'm running Windows2000 on a Dell 2450. I have 4 identical harddrives configured for RAID 5. It was shipped this way from the factory. Today the amber warning light on drive #2 starts blinking indicating a problem with that drive. The server, however, is still running just fine. The data is in tact. This is what I would have expected with RAID 5 -- one disk goes down and the system stays up. That's the whole point of RAID, or so I thought. I called Dell, hoping that they'd send out a replacement drive [I have a 4hr service contract with them]. The tech wanted me to jump through a series of hoops [take the drive out and "re-seat" it, run a rebuild via a SCSISelect utility, etc.]. The SCSISelect utility showed that there is a problem with drive #2 which I expected. The tech had me do a rebuild anyway. The rebuild appears to work at first, with drive #2 happily writing data -- but then at 20%, the rebuild fails. This came as no surprise to me because I figured the drive was bad.... but here's what the tech said that confuses me: He says that because the rebuild failed at 20%, it would be pointless to send me a new drive. He says that I need to delete the container and re-create it which means I'd lose ALL of the data. I should then reinstall Windows, restore my data from tape, etc. This seems crazy. I thought the whole point of RAID-5 is that my data is safe if only one drive fails -- and in fact my data IS safe! The server is running just FINE on only 3 drives. All I want is to do is replace drive#2 so that I have my redundancy again... but he's telling me that replacing drive #2 won't help and that I need to backup everything, recreate the container, rebuild, and then restore everything... and I didn't understand his explanation as to WHY I had to do this. Something to do with "parity" errors? He says he's seen this problem "100 times." I don't understand. This seems crazy. The data is still OK. It seems like I should be able to just stick a new drive in there, and the RAID 5 array should automatically rebuild itself. Help! |
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