I have run into a problem which is pretty serious on the LSI 9261 card which I would like for others to test and see if the same problem occurs.
I have created a RAID-5 array from 4x2TB drives. Everything works fine, but if I pull out a drive from that array, and then reinsert that same drive, the LSI card bios will not recognize it, and will claim the drive is bad.
Even if i format that HDD and then reinsert it, I wont be able to use it. If i insert a totally different drive, other than the ones which were used in the array it will detect it fine.
Simply doing a quick format in windows disk management for example isn't wiping out the very last 512 byte sector of the drive where most raid cards store their metadata. You'd need to zerofill the drive to wipe out that metadata. Tools like HDD Wipe Tool or HD Tune Pro trial can zero fill, unfortunately you'd have to wait for them to zerofill the entire drive just to hit the last sector, or you could use a tool like WinHex to jump straight to the last sector and zero it out.
I don't have a 9261 yet but will soon, and my first hunch is the behavior is by design rather than a bug. Perhaps there's a preference setting somewhere that controls that behavior. I can think of scenarios where the card not simply beginning a rebuild (write operation) on a previously "failed" drive is the preferred behavior.
Here's the question - when you power down the system and power back up with the "failed" drive inserted, does it still show the drive as failed/bad?
In any case its good that you're doing synthetic failure tests ahead of a real failure so you know what to expect - most people don't bother and then panic when a real failure does happen, in some cases making a bad situation worse.
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