here it is saturday night. i’m sitting here in my fuckin cube at work streaming the NCAA games. two of the RAID drives on our/my server died. we lost ALL data (even payroll). so now i’m trying to rebuild them. takes forever. i’m watching progress bars, formatting, and trying to decipher whether or not one of the drives (there are 3 in my RAID) are dead or if it is the RAID control (manages all the drives) itself. if its the controller i will need to buy a new server.
I ran into the same situation about 3 years ago, when 3 drives in our RAID died on one day.
So we had to reinstall the server and restore everything from tape - it took almost 2 days and nights, until everything was like before.
lol. just another reminder for me to stick with RAID 5.
It looks like its the fucking controller. I can’t create a container more than 8 gig on it. keeps crapping out. and when i do get that 8 gig container to format it craps out on me during the OS install.
lol. just another reminder for me to stick with RAID 5.
Yeah we use Raid 5 on our database servers at work. Pretty solid and very good performance. Though, yes, it’s a bitch to set things up with that (takes forever).
i could NEVER get a RAID 5 to happen across 3 drives. what i eventually did (just to get the server to run) was to make a volume on one drive. (longs story short - i HAVE to get this up for the finance dept) its running fine. would you say that is a controller failure or a drive problem?
i was able to format each drive individually (in the RAID config BIOS), however when i tried to raid 5 across 3 it would not work - sometimes it would get farther than other times. granted… my office is cheap as hell and i’ve got 2 segates (that i got second hand last time this happend) and one maxtor. do you guys think this could all be solved by buying 3 new drives? or does it sound like a controller failure?
The minimum number of drives for raid 5 is 3, which you have, so that’s good. I think it may be bugging out because either the drives are not all the same specs (ie. different rpm speed - I think different sizes is okay but that’ll be wasting some space). I would always try to set up raid with the same exact hard drive models.
If then that does not work, chances are that it’s the controller. Though, that’s hard to say right now until all drives are the same. So I would get another Seagate (which are good SCSI drives in my experience) to replace that Maxtor. Make sure they are all the same RPM speed and preferably size.
Did you run checks on each drive individually through the raid bios? Sounds like you did when you formatted each one. I’m willing to guess it’s expecting the same 3 drives and 1 is not. Try that first and then go from there. Have you checked forums for that controller?
yea - i actually “formatted” each drive individually in the raid bios. so each drive alone is fine. the problems arose when i tried to stripe across them. i’m thinking - really hoping - that its the fact that there’s differnet types. now granted… they’re all the same size however, RPM could be differnt and the name brands are differnt. so right now i’m successfully extracting the quickbooks file off the tape back up. then i’m going to go buy 3 brand new scsi drives and go from there. i made it clear to the owners - we are NOT going to skimp on the drives this time. thanks for the feedback.