msa70 p800 RAID6 2 disks died

[ktan67]

Hello,

As noted in subject, I have a msa70 with 2 dead disks.  One online spare is currently initializing.  There are 10 X 600GB SAS disks in array.  My question is whether or not  I should wait until the current spare is fully initialized to replace the second dead disk?  The array is in constant use with about 15 virtual servers depending on it.  The last time a drive died it took a almost a week for the replacement disk to get fully initialized.  And yes, it is in the roadmap to rebuild these arrays as RAID 10 as soon as we get some new storage to move current servers away.

Helpful thoughts and comments always appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

[StorageMike]

Hi

If it was me I'd err on the side of caution and wait for the rebuild to complete before replacing the other failed disk.  In theory you've lost all RAID protection with the lose of the two disks, if a further disk is lost you'll likely loose all your data.  Adding a new disk now will probably cause the rebuild cycle to restart from scratch lengthening the amount of time you're without RAID protection.

If your backups are good and outage isn't a big issue you could blow away the raid set, recreate it  and restore from backup.

Out of interest why are you thinking of moving to RAID10?  This may provide better read performance but you have less protection from disk loss.

Thanks