Predictive Failure Drive replacement

[Patrick Giblin]

I have a 72GB SCSI Hot-Swap drive that is experiencing S.M.A.R.T. errors. The LED indicators are as follows: Activity: Flashing, Online: On, Fault: Flashing. In the HP disk drive status tables I have been able to find, this is the only situation they don't tell you whether or not it is safe to replace the drive online. Is online safe or do I need to go offline?

Any assistance is gratly appreciated.

PG

[kris rombauts · Accepted solution]

Patrick,

this drive is still being accessed for read/write operations, so it is still an active disk.

So it depends if this disk is part of a redundant array (i.e. RAID1, RAID 5 ...) on a SmartArray controller.

If you are sure the disk is part of a redundand array then the disk can be replaced online with a known good disk, the array controller will take care of the rebuilding of the data and besides some performance loss during the revuild process, you will be able to keep the server online, no down time needed.

It is not because the disk is a hotswap type of disk that it can be removed online, it really depends if there is a raid controller behind it that takes care of the data redundancy or not.
If you do not have a array controller, or if the disk is part of a non redundant array (i.e. RAID 0) then you need to backup the data, bring server down, replace disk, boot server, partition the disk and restore data.


As always, take a backup before you start such operations.

HTH

Kris

[Patrick Giblin]

Yes...it is in an MSA1000 and part of a RAID5 array.

Thanks for your help.

PG