Raid 5 question

Question

following up on the situation i last had with the orange light.  My raid 5, one of the drives has 2 steady green lights.  I have not a lot of experience with raids, so I ask.  If I was to swap tapes (lets'say the one showing the steady  lights with #3 or #4) would that affect my Raid? Would it corrupt the data?   The reasoning for this is that I want to make sure if the problem is with the Drive or the part of the computer that the drives connect to.   Any input?

countryman73460 · Answer

First question is 'If I was to swap tapes', you meant 'hard drives' correct? Unseating a drive will cause it to fall offline, or in the case of a PERC 5, to be marked as foreign. Remove 2 drives and you will be creating some major problems. So Please do not attempt this. The green flashing lights are indicative of drive activity. The drive appears to be online. Are any of the lights on the drives amber? It would be more helpful if I knew more about your sysetm, PERC or SAS? Number of hard drives. Current RAID level. Could you Please provide this infomation. If you're not sure of the hardware configuration, Please go to the following link while logged on from the server in question. This will provide the hardware information. http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/my_systems_info/en/system_profiler_agreement?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

msomohano · Answer

i'll get you the info in a while.  The thing with this server (PE 2500 SC) is that the first drive of the Raid (type 5) has two solid green lights, when it should have only one.  The Middle indicator should flash green and go out, but it stays put.  Only on this drive.  On the rest of the drives the lower indicator stays solid green always, as it should.   So my question is, why is it that the middle indicator is solid green always? is there a hard drive problem? a back panel problem? I've runned every single discovery and diagnostic tool that dell has to offer.  No problems found.  But there has to be a reason for this.

warwizard55 · Answer

Hi,     That could be an indication that you have a lot of I/O on that drive, such that it seems to be on solid.     If you have multiple logical drives and that one is for the O/S and resides only on that drive, and you are paging excessive amounts thru the page file, I could see a single drive showing contuning activity. Check your performance monitor. If you are beating up the drive due to the page file, then adding memory to the server would help.     Of course this is all speculation without knowing more about your system's configuration.   warwizard

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

Raid 5 question

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