Correcting a degraded MSA2312i

[Paul_637]

I have the above array with 6 x 500Gb SATA & 6 x 450Gb SAS disks.

4 x SAS disks are in a RAID-10 VDisk with 2 x spares.

4 x SATA disks are currently *visible* in a RAID-5 VDisk with one (recently replaced) 500Gb as "Avail" and another as "LEFTOVR".

The RAID-5 set is currently showing a status of "DEGRADED".

I'm not entirely sure of the history (I've just been asked to look into this issue) but what I *think* has happened is that at least one disk in the Raid-5 VDisk has failed resulting in the degraded state. It's possible that the remaining disk was allocated as a spare and that has also failed at some point.

So, assuming that I want to get to a 5 disk RAID-5 VDisk with one spare, what is the best way of achieving it?

Should I effectively "Expand" the VDisk with the currently unassigned "spare" disk, or, due to it being degraded, should something else happen?

Alternatively, should I add the "Avail" disk as a true spare, which will then immediately start getting rebuilt onto by the VDisk? Then, do a metadata cleanup on the "LEFTOVR" disk and make that a spare once the rebuild has completed (which I know can take quite a while on the MSA2k from what I've read).

I'm trying to get some documentation confirming how it was originally configured but it's not forthcoming as yet - the only info I have is a document stating that a "Raid-5 array with 2Tb of raw space" was initially provisioned. The only way of getting that with Raid-5 (with 500Gb disks) is to have 5 disks in the VDisk, hence my reasoning above.

Any advice appreciated in sorting this mess! I shall ensure that someone is shouted at for not providing decent documentation of the config when it was handed over!

Regards,

Paul

I'm not entirely sure of the history