Split Raid 1 Mirror

Question

I have a Dell 1800 that has the OS on a Raid 1 connected to  a 1.5/6chanel sata raid card. Often I find that machines go down not due to a hardware failure but because some part of the OS becomes corrupted (which I guess could be due to hardware). When that happens both drives involved in the Raid become useless becuase the have the same corrupted data.   In the past I have periodically ghosted the OS drive as a disaster plan however please tell me if the following would also work.   1. Can I use the open manage 'split raid' function on the Raid 1 (the disks are 'basic') and leave both disks connected as they are in the box.   2. I assume that the OS will then be booting off the first positioned drive say position 0. If the bootup drive at position 0 fails then I can swap the sata cable to drives 0 and 1 and boot up on the other, replace the failed raid drive and re-mirror?   The open manage raid software from Dell has a 'split mirror' function but I don't see a 'mirror' function. Also, when I split the raid will the box still be able to boot from the other drive, position 2, as describe above or does the 'split mirror' function somehow render that drive unbootable.   Thanks in advance for any thoughts/comments.

Dev Mgr · Answer

The situation you're running into is what backups are for.

Raid is there to protect against a disk failure, but data is protected by doing regular backups.

I'm not sure about splitting a raid-1 or automating that if that's what you're wanting to do.

PNewfeld · Answer

I am already doing backups and I do not have a split backplane. It's much easier to just swap out a hard drive then to spend hours rebuilding the OS, reinstalling SQL server, database, Exchange server and restoring from backup.   So back to my question, is what I want to do a possible solution?   TIA

pcmeiners · Answer

Try this for raid 1 recovery.....   http://web2.minasi.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=15270&SearchTerms=raid,1

PNewfeld · Answer

Yes, thank you. That is absolutely what I want to do and doesn't it make perfect sense! 9 of 10 times a server crashes due to a BSOD or similar and thtis is a quck way to get it back up. Thanks again for the link.

pcmeiners · Answer

Over the years switching the drives of a raid 1 for recovery has saved me at least 40 server rebuilds. Sure beats having to do a basic OS install and a tape restore. Using a hotspare on raid 1 is even niftier, if you plan on a regular disk pull for an image. As far as corruption, raid 1 will not stop a program or user caused corruption from being mirrored but a raid1 will stop corruption caused by  disk errors from duplicating to the mirror or minimize it, most of the time.

PowerEdge HDD/SCSI/RAID

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