Re: SCSI Question

You should be able to add a hot spare at any time. You won't be able to
take a 5 disk array and convert it to a 4 disk with hot spare, but you could
add a 6th disk and configure that as a hot spare.

If a disk goes bad, you just replace it according to the instructions for
the specific RAID controller on the server. I always get this from Dell
since I'm too busy (read lazy) to read the manual. It's always a simple
procedure.

If you have a hot spare, you take the failed or failing drive offline in the
controller software (Open Manage). That causes it to fail over to the hot
spare, which takes an hour or two depending on the amount of data. Then you
replace the failed drive with a new one, and configure the new one as a hot
spare.

Double check this with Dell - when you buy the servers, they want all the
drives in an array to be the same size. Afterward, you should be able to
add a larger drive, which can dedicate space equal to the smaller drives as
part of the array or hot spare. In other words, you have 5 36 GB drives and
a 72 GB hot spare. A dead drive will fail over to 36 GB of the larger
drive. But again, double-check all of this with Dell so you can get the
exact details for the controller you're running.


"HENRYW" <henryw@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:OldL%23ntwGHA.4876@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I have SBS 2003 installed across 5 disks. It is a Dell server 2600 whose
Perc controller / configuration created a stripe / RAID 5 array across
these disks.

Question:
---------

(1) If one of the disks goes bad, do I just replace the disk? Or is
there are option to create a hot spare BEFORE creating the RAID 5 stripe -
so I could just replace the disk?

(2) Do the disks have to be the same size? In what instance does it need
to the same size?



.

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