Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 07 Jan 2005 17:51:59 GMT
Well, this isn’t looking promising–my new drives arrived, but the big RAID array is throwing errors left and right. I’m not sure how much data I’ll be able to recover off the thing. Most of the data on the drive is reconstructible, but not everything. Most of this contents are old digital pictures, but I’ve tried to write them all to DVD before throwing them onto the RAID array. Odds are I missed some stuff, though.
Amazingly enough, the system logs seem to have survived unscathed, so I’ll write up a “anatomy of a drive failure” article later, showing what this looked like from a SMART perspective. Since I’ve never actually seen a SMART-monitored drive failure before, it should be somewhat educational.
Posted in Computer System Administration | Tags broken, drive, failure, linux, raid, smart | no comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Thu, 06 Jan 2005 19:49:46 GMT
As mentioned earlier, I spent part of the long weekend cleaning up home theater stuff. Part of this involved migrating files onto my home file server, which is an old Athlon 700 with an 8-channel 3ware RAID card and 4 160 GB drives in a 450 GB RAID 5 array.
So what happens as soon as I finish copying stuff onto the array? A drive starts failing on the RAID array, and I discover that it was already running in degraded mode. Now I’m in danger of losing all 200 GB on the array. Most likely, it won’t come to that, but it’s still fantastically irritating. Of the 4 160 GB drives that I bought last year, 2 of them have now failed.
To make sure that this doesn’t happen again, I just ordered 2 more 160 GB drives from NewEgg (only $76 each), along with a 3-in-2 style drive cooler. Assuming that it all arrives tomorrow, I should be able to rebuild the array, including a spare drive this time, and hopefully I won’t have to worry about it failing again.
Posted in Computer System Administration, Toys, Personal | Tags 3ware, broken, drive, failure, ide, raid | no comments
