Raid controller configuration

Question

I have called Dell reguarding this, after they offered no real insight I called Microsoft. Neither answers satisfy me. Maybe someone here can offer some help. Recently we had a hard drive go out on our exchange server. The exchange server is hooked up to a power vault 220. Its set up as a raid 5 array. When the drive went out in the array, it caused data corruption. Because of the corruption we had a of a time getting the exchange server back to where it was before the drive failure. We have also experienced the same type of corruption on some of our SQL databases when drives fail. So I am wondering, is there something im missing? We use raid 5 hoping that if a drive fails we can order a new one put it in asap and experience no down time. Does anyone know of any settings in the raid controller that we should be setting to prevent this type of corruption? Any suggestions? Thanks for the help

adpwl1 · Answer

What RAID card are you using to drive the PV220 and are you on the latest firmware for both the SCSI card and the Controller cards on the PV220.

Supraz · Answer

Its a Perc4 DC and yes all firmware current

realized · Answer

I think that is misleading.

A raid 5 from what I understand and from my experience doesn't do much for protecting data. The "parity" disk is misleading as well.

Consider a raid5 for performance, not protection.

Regardless of the raid configuration you use, a RAID does not replace a backup system.

Dev Mgr · Answer

I agree that one shouldn't depend on raid as a substitute for backups, but a raid container should be able to withstand a failed drive and then the rebuild afterwards.

Are you using dynamic disk maybe? I've seen where dynamic disk on top of hardware raid sometimes causes some strange side effects with data and rebuilds.

You may want to contact Poweredge support and have them go over a DSET of your server to see if anything stands out.

PowerEdge Hardware General

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