Replacement of Disk failure

[FSchuyts]

Hi everybody,

We have a MSA P2OOO G3 with 2 expansions.

each expansion is configured with 12 disks in RAID5. As all disks are needed there are no dedicated spares in those expansions.

So 3 global spare disks has been assigned for reconstruction.

When removing a disk, the global spare does its job perfectly.

My question is the following :

Should I wait for the reconstruction to be finished before replacing the disk, put him as dedicated spare and remove the global spare ?

Or as soon as I  replace the disk, can I remove the global spare immediately ?

The point is that the reconstruction is long for RAID5. In the other hand, as the disk is doing I/O, i guess it's not a good idea to remove it ;-)

Thank you for your opinion and experience wih it.

[AnkitM]

If the disk has been failed and any global spare is kicked in, you will need to wait till reconstruction is complete.

Once, the reconstruction is complete, you may replace the faulted disk and Configure it as a vDisk or Global Spare as you may desire.

When a failed drive rebuilds to a spare, the spare drive now becomes the new drive in the virtual disk. At this point, the original drive slot position that failed is no longer part of the virtual disk. The original drive now becomes a “Leftover” drive.
In order to get the original drive slot position to become part of the virtual disk again, do the following:
1. Replace the failed drive with a new drive.
2. If the drive slot is still marked as “Leftover”, use the “Clear Disk Metadata” option found in the “Tools” submenu.
3. When the new drive is online and marked as “Available”, configure the drive as a global spare drive.
4. Fail the drive in the original global spare location by removing it from the enclosure. The RAID engine will rebuild to the new global spare which will then become an active drive in the RAID set again.
5. Replace the drive you manually removed from the enclosure.
6. If the drive is marked as “Leftover”, clear the metadata as in step 2 above.
7. Re-configure the drive as the new global spare.

You may also refer to P2000 Best Practice Guide for your future reference: http://h20195.www2.hp.com/v2/GetPDF.aspx/4AA3-2141ENW.pdf