Greg Oster wrote:
I worry more about a hardware RAID card forgetting its configuration
after a power outage than I do about parity checking in the
background :) ("What do you mean these 14 disks in this 2TB hardware
RAID array are now all 'unassigned'!?!?!?!". That wasn't a fun day.)
Really? We've had something similar happening to us a while ago. The
system was running on a 3 disk RAID 5 array. A supermicro backplane went
up in flames[1] and the server was shut down. An engineer booted the
server without the backplane, but with one disk missing from the RAID 5
array, so upon next boot the missing disk was connected and a rebuild
was ordered.
However, the rebuild was taking too long and the server was rebooted to
do the rebuild in the background. The server came up fine and we were
searching for the necessary tools to start the background rebuild. We
thought we were in the clear when suddenly windows started acting all
weird, eventually crashed (I didn't see if it was a bluescreen, we were
working via terminal server at that time), and the server was rebooted
again. After this incident, the controller configuration was gone and
all three disks appeared as "Ready". Gone was the RAID.
We eventually were able to recover some data by re-creating the array
(luckily someone knew the blocksize originally used) and not
initializing when reconstructing the RAID. The operating system was
foobar though and couldn't be booted anymore.
This was with an intel-rebranded LSI card with an intel BIOS.
Anyone got any similar experiences with hardware RAID cards? Hardware
RAID has always been misery for me.
[1]
http://users.opengate.be/~glenn/album/index.php?folder=/Misc/Burnt%20Supermicro%20Backplane/
