Replacing and rebuilding a drive
When a hard disk drive goes defunct,
a Rebuild operation is required to reconstruct the data for the device in its
respective disk array. The ServeRAID controllers can reconstruct RAID level-1
and RAID level-5 logical drives, but they cannot reconstruct data stored in
RAID level-0 logical drives. To prevent data integrity problems, the ServeRAID
controllers set the RAID level-0 logical drives to blocked during a Rebuild
operation. After the Rebuild operation completes, you can unblock the RAID level-0
logical drives, and access them once again. But remember, the logical drive
might contain damaged data.
To perform a Rebuild operation:
- Select the defunct physical drive
from the Main Tree.
- Select Replace drive and rebuild
from the Actions menu.
- Click OK to use the same
drive slot and SCSI ID if you have physically replaced the defunct drive with
a new drive.
Once you have replaced the defunct
drive with a new drive, the ServeRAID Manager automatically starts rebuilding
the drive. The Manager displays a progress indicator in the status
bar.
Use this action on defunct drives
that are part of a critical logical
drive. If the defunct drive is not part of any critical logical drives, but
is in the array, you cannot use this action. Use Set
drive state to online instead.
Notes:
- The ServeRAID controller can
perform only one Rebuild operation at a time.
- If the array contains a critical
logical drive, the Rebuild operation changes the hard disk drive state from
defunct to Rebuild. After the Rebuild operation completes, the hard disk drive
state changes from Rebuild to online. (If you rebuild to a ready drive, the
defunct drive is removed from the disk array and becomes a defunct hot-spare.)
- The hard disk drive being rebuilt
must be the same size or larger than the failed drive.
- If a hot-spare drive is available,
a Rebuild operation will start automatically.
- If multiple hot-spare drives are
available, the ServeRAID controller searches all the drives on each channel
for a hot-spare drive of the appropriate size. The first appropriate hot-spare
drive found enters the Rebuild state.