Changing the disks on a Power Edge R510 -- Dos and don'ts ?

Question

Hello,

We have a few Power Edge R510 ( 12 disk options, RAID-6 ). The disks are getting old and a few died this winter (3 total on a specific server).

I have little experience with maintaining systems with RAID arrays. So, I am wondering what is the best strategy to take:

1) keep replacing diligently the disks as they die

2) replace all disks in one shot (we do have enough spare distributed space to do it)

I guess my real question is : at some point, are the disks going to die all together and put us at risk of loosing data even if I keep changing the disks as soon as they fail ? Am I gonna wake up one morning with 3 disks dead ?

Thanks in advance for your comments

Gilbert

pcmeiners · Accepted Answer

Keep disk and raid adapter firmware up to date

Change disks very soon after the failure or when reported they will fail soon

Best to have a hot spare in place

Do not use refurb or recertified disks

Your disks are not going to die all at once, except due to a firmware glitch, an unusual power issue or a very unusual drive PCB component failure.

theflash1932 · Accepted Answer

Agreed.  If you have had that many drive failures, something else is wrong, cuz that's not normal.  As pc said, update your firmware (iDRAC, BIOS, RAID (driver first), etc.), and make sure you are using certified drives - do NOT use desktop/laptop (non-enterprise) disks as replacements.

GSoucy · Answer

Thanks! I will update the firmware.

As for the many failures, I suspect this is due to the construction work in our building. There is a lot of dust and we dont have a clean room for our servers. We do our best to protect them and remove the dust often (about every 3 months) but dust is not nice.

PowerEdge Hardware General

Changing the disks on a Power Edge R510 -- Dos and don'ts ?

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