Ml530R01 w/6402-128 controller

[Stanley jenereski]

The controller is connected via channels A and B to a MS30 channels A and B respectively.

The MSA30 is fully populated w/72.8mb, 15k u320 HD's as follows:

Raid 5 consisting of 2 logicial drives.

LD 1 consists of drives 1 through 6
drive 14 is the Hot Spare


LD 2 consists of drives 7 through 13

Drive 7 is loacated on BUS 1 while the remaining 6 drives are on bus 2.

Problem: Drive 7 has failed 3 times since this configuraton ( once every week to a week and a half). FW revs are from the 7.3 firmware CD. and we are planning to upgrade to the latest firmware from the 7.5 CD.

OS Level is 2000 server

My question is: can I span 2 buses for a logical drive or must I keep my logicial drives to one bus per.

[raadek · Accepted solution]

You can span your logical drive accross multiple buses as long they are on the same controller - and that's exactly your case.

[Stanley jenereski]

My thanks for the response.

would you or anyone know what if any limitations there are in regards to the spare drive. Right now the spare is at slot 14. If I make 14 drive 7 my hot spare than my failure rate hopefully will go down on the drives at location 7.

The problem I have is that I must backup my data then reconfig then restore which as you know a long process.

[raadek]

I am not 100% sure what is your actual concern, but a hot-spare drives is global, i.e. can be used on any bus.

Let me rephrase that - the controller doesn't care on what bus is certain hard drive & this applies also to hot-spares.

Rgds

[Stanley jenereski]

OK,

I undertand that the hot spare is global but my question (resrictions) is, should the hot spare always be in a certain slot location or can it be at any slot.

Thus the results will be if I reconfigure:

If I can move the Hot spare to slot 7, then move my data disk to slot 14 and then the problem moves to slot 14 then I know that this is more than a defective drive/slot issue.

[raadek]

Hot spare can sit in any slot.

[Stanley jenereski]

my thanks