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5158
October 5th, 2008 20:00
offline archiving possible (2950/linux)?
Hi. I'd appreciate if you you folks can spend your valuable time reading this and helping me out.
I wish to do this on my 2950 server. Please check if any of this is not possible so I dont go and buy these hard disks.
Given the disk slots in a 2950 are numbered like so:
0 2 4
1 3 5
1) I wanna put four 1TB SATA disks in the 2950. It currently has 6 SAS disks in it. Can I remove all SAS drives, enable the SATA ports in the bios and put SATA disks in there? Is that all it takes to go from SAS to SATA? Or is something else required?
2) I wanna mirror disks in slots 0 and 1 and install the OS (RHEL 5 64bit) on there.
3) I wanna mirror the disks in slots 2 and 3 and use that in my system as a separate mountpoint (say /data) to store backups of critical data.
4) When /data is full, I wanna break the mirror using Megacli utility and remove the disk in slot 3 and store it offline to be able to restore from it in the future.
5) I then put a new 1TB disk in slot 3 and create a new mirror (destroying all data in disk in slot 2 as well) and mount that as /data and start backing up critical data to it.
6) repeat steps 4 and 5 when /data is full again.
7) If I need to restore data from disks stored offline, I place them in slot 4 or 5 and mount them on /restore and pull data off. Will I be able to mount a disk that used to be part of a mirror on this system as a separate partition?
8) If 2TB disks becomee available in the future, I wish to use those in slots 2 and 3.
Please let me know if any of the steps 1 through 8 won't work based on your knowledge.
Dev Mgr
6 Operator
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9.3K Posts
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October 6th, 2008 13:00
It may go fine 99% of the time, but that 1 case may completely down your server (or worse).
If you want offline backups, use a tape drive, RD1000 or some USB harddrive (not supported by Dell, but relatively inexpensive) or so.
Note: using 2 x 1TB in a raid 1 for boot is fine, but keep in mind that any system with a bios could never boot to a (virtual) disk that totals over 2TB.
raiddude
36 Posts
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October 15th, 2008 20:00
I'm making the assumption that you're using a PERC6 controller?
If so, for #1 - your instructions are incorrect. Do not enable the SATA ports. The PERC6/i controller will support SAS or SATA without issues or reconfiguration.
Agree with the follow up about the break mirror. The only way to safely break a mirror is to cleanly shut down the server, then pull the disk. there will be errors/warnings about degraded VDs until the configuration is cleared and a new VD created. One note, you will want to perform a fast init when you recreate the configuration so that the partition table of the old disk isn't still readable on the mirror
For 7 - that should work, it will be a foreign configuration that you would need to import, and it would import as a degraded R1 array. You should be able to then mount this disk and use it.