Raid1 Hotswapping

D

Druneau

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jan 3, 2006
Messages
1,745
I've assembled basic server using a Highpoint 2310. (asus P5K-V, E8400, 4GB, Server2003 Standard Edition)

The goal was to run Raid1 with two SATA drives. Have one drive in the case, three drives in enclosures with one 5.25 hotswap bay in the case.

Then, as a portable backup remove a drive and swap for another one every now and then.

The issue I'm having, is that upon inserting a "blank" drive for the first time the array will rebuild. But then, after swapping every drive once, the computer sees "two" arrays.... and won't automatically rebuild. I can manually delete the "obsolete" array and add the drive to the "good" array. But this is inconvenient (I won't always be the one swapping the drives).

The card's bios doesn't show me much. I've tried not using the management software in windows to see if card only would work but I get no feedback on if it's actually rebuilding. Until I've used all the blank drives then the bios shows "2" arrays name identically.

My questions would be:

-what am I missing?
-would a different sata/raid card change anything?

Thanks,
 
Once you take a good RAID 1 array drive, and plug it into the array, it cannot tell which drive is the good array, so it asumes both are good.

Simply delete the partition of the drive you are plugging back into the array. If it is blank, the array should properly rebuild the array.

I see no way around this. As long as there is valid RAID info on the disk, the array will not be able to distinguish which drive is the good array.

Don
 
That is the logical way of looking at it. I understand the card would not want to destroy the good array.

I guess what I'd need would be an option to label a specific channel on the card as "Spare drives go here"... so the card would just start rebuilding.

I'll take a look at what card my friend has which does what I need to see if it's an option in his card or the actual way it was designed.
 
The "working" setup is using a Promise fasttrack TX2000 PRO (IDE) card.

I went ahead and ordered a 2port PCI SATA Promise fasttrack TX2300 card.

The reason being.. the card has two ports only. Theoretically only 1 raid1 array can be present at anytime. If they did a halfassed engineering job it will ignore what is on the second connected drive and overwrite everything :D. (At least this is what I hope will happen)
 
When you plug in the good drive again, your array thinks that it's a working duplicate so it shows as two arrays.

I don't understand what you are trying to accomplish. Are you actually swapping out live drives in a raid 1 array as a backup?! If you are, I'd highly suggest that this not be done, you are taking a risk every time you pull out a working drive like that.


What you should rather do is have a backup drive, a drive dedicated for the purpose of backing up, so you can do nightly transfers onto that drive, perhaps using an imaging software if you want and rotate that target drive instead.
 
Ockie,

I do want to remove the drive while it's live in the array. I understand this is not the "right" way of using RAID1.

If I cannot get the other card to do what I'm trying to I'll definitely look into setting up the RAID1 inside the case, and using a backup solution on a drive in the external hot-swap enclosure.

Any suggestions for a good basic software that would image the array to a drive?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top