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In my experience the most common way to kill an array (barring dodgy hardware RAID) is yanking the wrong drive. Yes, it happens.
by regularfry 14y ago
In my experience the most common way to kill an array (barring dodgy hardware RAID) is yanking the wrong drive. Yes, it happens.
- lsc 14y agoSure, but if you don't screw up the force rebuild, the data is still there. I mean, if I've got a RAID5 with one bad drive, and I pull one of the good drives, the thing is going to immediately hang hard. You can boot the thing into single user mode and force-reassemble it, and you get the data back (well, mostly. you certainly would get all the data loss you'd get when yanking the power) That said, all my arrays are lit all the time, meaning that even without the red 'bad drive' lights (which I haven't gotten working yet with md) if you just avoid pulling drives with active activity lights, you are good. Another trick I've tried is labeling the face of the hot swap caddy with the last 4 digits of the serial number of the hard drive. When I put in the ticket to pull the drive, I mention the last 4 of the serial. (but that hasn't really gotten off the ground, mostly due to a lack of level 1 lackies.) Right now I do most of the hard drive swaps myself, so it isn't a huge deal, but it is something I devote quite a lot of thought too; if I could use remote hands, I'd be ahead of the game, but most datacenter remote hands folks... well, lets just say that they seem to see 'foolproof' as a challenge.