Re: SCSI Question

Thank you Charlie and Dave, that clears it up.



"Dave Nickason [SBS MVP]" <gwdibble@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23HncVeuwGHA.4968@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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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