Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
1 Rookie
•
3 Posts
0
1114
September 7th, 2018 07:00
Moving physical drives between RAIDs
I have a Dell PowerEdge R510 with two virtual drives. Two physical drives set up as RAID 1. Four physical drives set up as RAID5. One of the physical drives in the RAID1 has failed. The R510 has a PERC H700 integrated controller.
I have a Dell PowerEdge R900. With a PERC6i controller. Only spun up occasionally. Currently has some data we might want some day. Its configuration is 2 virtual drives; first two drives are RAID1. Four drives are RAID5.
The R900 has the same kind of drives as the R510. 300GB 15k drives.
Some questions:
1. What happens if I just remove one of the 4 physical drives configured RAID5 in the R900? Do I lose data? Does it crash the system? What happens? In OpenManage, what is the purpose of the reconfigure task on the RAID 5 virtual disk?
2. The drive I remove from the R900 has data on it. Can I just put it in the slot of the failed RAID1 drive in the R510? The fact that the drive comes from a different machine with a different controller . . . does that matter?
Thanks for any pointers you can offer.
Daniel My
12 Elder
•
6.2K Posts
0
September 7th, 2018 10:00
Hello
RAID 5 is n+1, if you have a 4 drive RAID 5 and remove 1 drive it will go into a degraded state. The system will continue operating normally. If you have a second drive go offline the virtual disk will go into a failed state and the data will be inaccessible.
Reconfigure operations allow you to change the size of a virtual disk by either using existing space on disks or adding disks. You can read more about reconfigure operations in the OpenManage Server Adminstrator manuals. There is an OMSA storage manual that has a reconfigure section.
http://www.dell.com/openmanagemanuals/
Yes, it matters. The PERC6i and H700 write virtual disk tags on each disk in a virtual disk. This information describes the virtual disk. It has information like the size, RAID level, and number of disks. The controller also stores information about known virtual disks in its local memory. If it detects these descriptors on a disk but the virtual disk information is a mismatch or nonexistant on the controller then it will be flagged as a foreign disk. You will need to either import or clear the foreign configuration. An import will copy the virtual disk information from the drive to the controller. A clear will delete the virtual disk descriptors or metadata tags from the disk. Once the disk is cleared it should go to a ready state. You can then set it as a hot spare to initiate a rebuild. You can read more about foreign configurations in the storage controller manual.
http://www.dell.com/storagecontrollermanuals/
Thanks