Failed Disk in H710p array controller - Need Advice

Question

Hi Guys, I’m having some issues with a failed disk in a RAIDed server and wanted to ask a few questions. I have inherited this environment after our global IT guy was made redundant so the inner details are a little hazy. It is a Dell PowerEdge R720xd server with a Perc H710p Mini RAID controller. This server is used as a large network share that we map to other production servers to store data. One of the users complained that they could not create folders on it, so I rebooted the server and went into the RAID controller BIOS to see it was showing a disk as failed. I know it should just be a case of hot swapping a new drive and rebuilding the RAID but a few things are troubling me and I can’t find the answers online. I was hoping someone could shed some light: From the PD Mgmt screen, you can see that disk ID 11 has failed but it is not part of a disk group (I was expecting it to be part of disk group 01). When a drive fails does it normally drop its disk group until its fixed? From the VD Mgmt screen, within Disk Group 1, the failed disk with ID 11 does not show as a physical disk within that group. Again, is this an issue that is caused by the failure? Unfortunately, I don’t know the original configuration of this environment so although disk group 1 is showing as RAID 6 with 9 physical disks, I’m wondering should it be 10 disk as disk ID 11 is failed or is there another answer? Hope all of that is clear and I appreciate any help. Thanks, Rob.

DELL-Stefan R · Accepted Answer

Hey Rob,

from what I see the rebuild is already done and the RAID is fully functional. Otherwise, it would show up as degraded.

So you just have to replace the failed one and set it up as hot-spare, that's it

Cheers
Stefan

DELL-Stefan R · Answer

Hey there,

from what we know now, it's just guessing, but I think that the former IT guy created at least one drive as a global hot-spare. So, in case of a failure, the hot-spare gets assigned automatically to the disc group where the faulty physical drive is assigned. The faulty will get unassigned.

The picture you see is normal behavior. The next step would be to replace pd11 with a good one and make it a global hot-spare again.

To get a detailed view of what happened you might consult the controller's log file.

Here is a nice article about how to get such log files exported:

https://www.dell.com/support/article/en-us/sln292191/gathering-logs-for-advanced-troubleshooting-on-poweredge-servers?lang=en

Let me know if this already helped

BR
Stefan

Robert.Griffin · Answer

Thanks so much, Stefan. It was those small details I was unsure about but I think you're right. Once I pop in the new drive I will make it a global hot spare and the RAID should rebuild.

I'll give your link a look now.

Appreciate it,

Rob.

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

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