Raid 1 noob, need some help - SB600 controller

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Fark_Maniac

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Long story short, I built a "server" for a non-profit years ago using a Gigabyte GA-MA69G-S3H. I wanted just a tad more redundancy than normal builds, so I spent a bit more and setup a Raid 1 with the onboard SB600 controller with two Seagate ST380815AS drives. One of the drives died and now I'm running on just one drive. I'm very thankful that I did that Raid 1 mirror.

Now my problem is, now that I can't buy new drives to replace like for like...what the heck do I do now? I've done a bit of googling about raid 1 and some have said you can buy a dislike drive, but if it is larger, you only get to use the smaller amount.

The ST380815AS is an 80GB 7200rpm 8MB cache. My thought was to get two new 7200rpm drives. Install 1 and mirror it over, remove the older drive and add the 2nd newer drive...mirror that...now I'd have two like drives again, probably with a lot more cache. Does that make sense? If I don't get the funds for 2 drives, if I get a new drive with 16MB, will that cause any problems??

If anyone has any experience with this controller, I'd love some advice. I do have the WebPam software installed.
 
You're on the right track. You can replace one at a time and rebuild, or you can get a third device (external HDD for example) and image to that, replace both drives, and then return the image to the RAID. The only problem I can see if you do the drives one at a time is that the partition size information may get copied over, meaning you'll have to modify the partition table to include the remainder of the drive (since the first rebuild will leave a lot of unused space).

If you can only afford one drive, the mismatch of cache isn't going to cause issues.
 
I think I'll go for the mirror idea. I'm not too concerned about partition size. the drives are now 80GB and we aren't even using 30GB yet. I normally have folders in root that have junk, installs, and folder copies...maybe that's a good use for the extra storage.

Does rebuilding of the mirror occur in the raid configuration during POST, or is that done in the software when booted?
 
I haven't dealt with that controller specifically, but I have seen it done both ways. At home, I'm not worried about downtime and I activate the rebuild from the controller before OS loads, but on things like webservers I have seen people hot-swap the drive and rebuild while the OS is still running.

Looks like I found someone else who had a RAID1 on that same controller.
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-43191.html
Here is the part that is important:
"The RAID BIOS (Fastbuild), on the ATI/AMD SB600 Southbridge chipset, does NOT allow a user to specify "Rebuild RAID". This would be a normal option on a "grown-up" RAID card, but you wont see it on the SB600.

However, if you replace the failed hard drive, the SB600 *WILL* rebuild the RAID 1: You just have to have blind faith in it. The fact is, the SB600 Fastbuild BIOS will continue to mark the status of the RAID 1 as "critical" until the RAID is rebuilt. That's right - no progress indication at all, zippo.

The best thing to do is just leave the PC on and let it do its thing. You can reboot while it is rebuilding the RAID - that's not a problem. However, until the RAID is rebuilt, the BIOS will still indicate "Critical".

The larger the hard drives....the longer the rebuild (it can take many hours). You just have to have complete blind faith that the SB600 RAID controller is actually doing its thing."
 
I got two new drives and put them in yesterday. I must have had a setting on in the utility to automatically start rebuilding, as I booted up with one of the new drives in, it was already rebuilding with only an 80GB partition. Rebuild on that took 5hrs. I staged the 2nd drive and had the colo move power/sata cables from old drive to 2nd new drive and once again, when it booted up it started rebuilding to that drive.

I'm up and working on two new drives. it may have taken a long time, but it was pretty easy. I think I'm going to have to do that on my personal rig from now on...no sense in having data loss due to bad drives. Drives are cheap for what you get these days.

thanks for the help.
 
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