BL460c Gen10 - hot pluggable disk drives?

[Motuekahop]

BL460c Gen10Quickspecs says that it has HPE small form factor hot-plug SAS/SATA/ HDD or SSD hard drive bays. Let's say we have created RAID 1 mirror using 2 disks, installed some OS on it and my customer wants to perform a test withdrawing one of disks. What are the consequences? Is there any possibilyty of disk failure? Is ther automatic or manual synchronization of disks after I plug it back? How long does it take fot 1TB HDD? Where can I find some more info about it?

[sudhirsingh]

Hi,

Please refer "Breaking a mirror and rebuilding the array using the manual method" section on the following document which will answer most of your queries, you can also refer the other articles mentioned below for more information.

Breaking mirrors and rebuilding drives

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c00378986&docLocale=en_US

HPE Smart Array Controllers - Drive Procedures

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-a00020470en_us

HPE Smart Storage Administrator User Guide

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=c03909334

Title: HP Smart Array Controllers/HP ProLiant Servers - How to Replace a Faulty Hot-Plug or Non Hot-Plug Hard Disk Drive in a RAID Configuration

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=mmr_kc-0128606

Time required for a rebuild

The time required for a rebuild varies, depending on several factors:
• The priority that the rebuild is given over normal I/O operations (user can change the priority setting by using HP SSA/ACU)
• The amount of I/O activity during the rebuild operation
• The average bandwidth capability (MBps) of the drives
• The availability of drive cache
• The brand, model, and age of the drives
• The amount of unused capacity on the drives
• For RAID 5 and RAID 6, the number of drives in the array
• The strip size of the logical volume
• Firmware versions of the Smart Array Controller and Hard Disk Drive
• Presence of BBWC/FBWC

CAUTION: Because data rebuild time may go upto the rate of 200GB/15 minutes, the system could be unprotected against drive failure for an extended period during data recovery or a drive capacity upgrade. When possible, perform rebuild operations only during periods of minimal system activity.

Regards,

Sudhir

[Motuekahop]

1st doc says:

"You can break a RAID 1 or RAID 1(+0) mirror simply by removing a drive while the server is online. You must shut down the server first if you want to preserve the data on drives you are removing."

Does it mean, if I remove the disk from RAID1 while the server is online (OS running), I loose all data on removed disk, but it does not interrupt my OS. Then I can insert back the same disk that I previously removed and RAID1 rebuild process will start automatically started in the background.

How can I monitor that rebuild process without shutting down the server?