Putting a new HD in a Raid1

hitmanwa

Baseband Member
Messages
57
I'm new to this so I hope you'll bear with me. I have a Fujitsu Esprimo Raid1. It currently has 2 hard drives in it. This particular system run 1 of our departments at work. Is it worth it to buy a couple of extra HDs and mirror them and keep them on hand? I went ahead and tried this and it didn't seem to work. It downgraded the primary HD and would not let me rebuild it so it would mirror the 2nd HD I put in there. It kept saying there wasn't enough free space. Could someone maybe point me in the right direction on this one?

Thanks in advance,
 
Are you speaking of making a backup RAID 1 array and then removing it from the system to put back in, if needed? Just add more disks to the RAID 1 array if that is what you are trying to accomplish. You can also have "hot spares" in your RAID array - Inactive drives until one fails.
 
There is only room for 2 HDs. My understanding is a Raid 1 is for mirroring only, right? Meaning both hard drives are redundant, right? So if the master fails or gets corrupted doesn't the other HD fail as well since it's always a mirror image? Should I have a spare HD or 2 that are mirrors from a previous time in case this happens?

Again, I'm new at this so forgive my ignorance.
 
No, if one hard drive failed, you'd still have a duplicate drive to boot from.
You'd just need to replace the drive with an identical matching model (I would), for it to start the array again.

It's just if 2 drives failed at once for some reason, that you'd lose all data.

I use RAID 1 myself, and have been backing up, since one hard drive has reported it is going to fail.
 
Ok, thanks.

I did buy 2 more identical drives. The last 2 I could find since they've been discontinued. I shut the system down and replaced the 2nd drive with the new 1 expecting it to mirror the master. This didn't happen. It said the master was degraded or downgraded, can't remember which now. I went into the Raid manager and tried to reenable it and it said there wasn't enough space. Do I need to go into the Intel Matrix Storage Console and set the Array back up? I have to be careful not to wipe the master when I do this, right?

The systemis a Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo P5925 btw. I've tried finding a manual and some info on it but no real luck yet. There as nothing included with the machines when they arrived. They were set up with the projects beforehand.

How do I know if it's hot swappable? Can I just pull 1 of the drives out and put the other in or will I run into the same problem stated above?

Thanks a ton guys,
 
Bleh. In the future, just use Software RAID if you're running an OS capable of it. I have a Software RAID 1 setup at home on a 2.4 GHz Dual Core server and it's plenty fast AND redundant. No hardware to get in the way.

As far as the Intel matrix thing goes, worst case, I'd just take the drives off the controller, take the one with the data still on it and mirror the contents to one of those two new drives, and then keep the new drive with the backed up data handy as a backup-backup, then insert the two drives (the old and one of the new ones) into the array and rebuild the array (IT WILL ERASE ALL DATA!) and when you've verified that the array is working as it should, then move the data over from the backup-backup drive. Then you can be sure you're starting off on a good foot.
 
Back
Top Bottom