PowerEdge T310 with H200 won't create Raid 1 array with 2 x SATA 1TB drives

Hello

1. Is there not a utility to upgrade the firmware for an H200 other than from a Windows utility which means you have to have a running OS to execute it from?

All update methods require an operating system. You can use the hard drive version of the firmware update to update from DOS. You can also use the Linux update versions from a Linux live distro.

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=8TPD2

2. Does the H200 on version 7.01.09.00 support normal Raid 1 with 2 x SATA 1TB Western Digital 1003FBYZ drives?

That looks like a standard Western Digital hard drive. We do not validate third party drives for our controllers. We only validate drives running our firmware. If you choose to use non-Dell drives then functionality will be trial and error.

Thanks

Hi, thanks for speedy response.

Did see the 'hard drive' version but assumed it was something to do with hard drive firmware. Have now managed to upgrade firmware. Created new raid array with the 2 new WD discs but one is showing as a failed disc but it is correctly showing both as in the array which is better. No idea why my brand new WD disc is showing as failed , could still be issue with non validated drives I guess.

Given all this hassle I think I am very reluctantly going to have to revert to the old discs for the time being but when I reinserted them they show up ok in the controller utility but are both marked as inactive.

Question:

1. Is it ok to just activate the volume, and it will then return to how it was before I removed them and I can then boot off them as before? I am getting a little twitchy that I may do something that could render the array none usable and then I have nothing and nowhere to go.

Thanks

 

1. Is it ok to just activate the volume, and it will then return to how it was before I removed them and I can then boot off them as before? I am getting a little twitchy that I may do something that could render the array none usable and then I have nothing and nowhere to go.

Yes, that should work. The predictive failure status on the one drive is a warning that it has had a lot of blocks marked bad. That drive is likely to fail, but it it still functional.

Thanks

I think you are overthinking the problem.

The problem appears to be that you have 1 bad drive that is about to fail. That drive is causing performance issues.

I would suggest that you remove that drive and install one of the drives that you just bought. Let that new drive rebuild into the array. The drives in the array do not have to be identical. They need to be the same type(SAS, SATA) and the new drive need to be the same size OR larger than the other driver. Just pull the bad drive and put in the new drive in it's place. It should start automatically rebuilding if you have a backplane. If the drives are cabled then you may need to manually sync the array. Instructions for replacing a drive are in the H200 manual.

Thanks

Hi, I went ahead with that after reading the H200 manual and it come up ok. I see after a while that the lights on the disc with the predicted failure often appears to lock up as it goes into retries which is where the performance hit is I guess. Would it in fact be better to pull that disc and drop into degraded mode where the single disc left would operate normally? Again, I get very nervous doing this when real data is at stake!

Of course I would not need to do this if I could get the restore to work. I read a lot about the disc organisation having to be the same to do a restore but as I only have a DVD and the raid controller in I can't see how I have that wrong. I boot off the DVD. The disc on the controller shouldn't need to be partitioned as that gets done by the restore, I should just need a single disc there of the right size to restore to. I did read something about the boot order needing to be the same, could that in some way be the issue. The boot order was set as DVD then Controller disc then Nic. I boot off the dvd to get to the restore application but that process creates other drives for the operating system it uses, could that be the issue?

Really appreciate your help here.

Thanks

I'm afraid that is part of my problem, I only had 2 SATA drives available at short notice so have been trying to put in new raid set and do system restore. I assume that if the backup is done from the SAS Raid virtual disc that there is no problem in theory in restoring to a SATA raid virtual disc, the discs types are masked by the controller and there is no subtle difference in the disc structure between the 2 virtual drives? Thanks

Oh, the old drives are SAS and the new ones are SATA. Yes, you should have no issues copying data or restoring between the two arrays.

Thanks Daniel for all your help. Just one last thing then, I might just a well pull the bad disk anyway, not really much point in having it slug the system. Am I right that in degraded mode there is no actual difference to using a single disc on its own so performance should revert to be totally normal again?

Am I right that in degraded mode there is no actual difference to using a single disc on its own so performance should revert to be totally normal again?

Yes