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On 20 Dec 2007, at 07:31, Steve Dommett wrote: |
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> On Thursday 20 December 2007, Stroller wrote: |
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> |
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> I maintain a few Poweredges, I think mostly 2950. Just yesterday |
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> we swapped a |
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> drive on the Fusion MPT SAS controller. We were prompted to take |
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> the drive |
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> out of service by an email from 'smartd'... |
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> |
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> After failing and removing the drive from the array using 'mdadm', |
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> we tried |
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> hotswapping the drive, and whilst nothing untoward happened when we |
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> pulled |
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> the drive there were no kernel messages either. ... We had to |
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> reboot the server to get it to see the replacement drive. |
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Funnily enough, I've experienced something similar on this 2800 of |
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ours the last couple of days, also a prefailure. This machine is |
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running Windows, and the new drive was recognised in OpenManage |
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Server Administrator <https://localhost:1311> but despite it showing |
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exactly the same size (68.24gig) as the other two already installed |
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(as RAID1) when I tried to assign it as global hot-spare I got |
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directed to a message saying that it was insufficient to accommodate |
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all virtual disks. |
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The Dell tech support guy - who has been BRILLIANTLY helpful over a |
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simple failed drive, by the way - advised installing the latest |
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firmware updates. After rebooting the drive has been fine, and I was |
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able to allocate as hot-spare with a single click, although I guess I |
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can't say whether this is because of the updates or of just the |
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reboot. But the engineer also mentioned these updates, so multiple |
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sources concur, at least. The DRAC remote-administration unit also |
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seems much more responsive with the newer firmware. |
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> ... I was expecting something |
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> similar to when I've hotplugged SATA drives on my desktop machine. |
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What controller is in that, please? |
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Does it do hardware RAID, or is it just a regular SATA controller? |
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I've been reading a little about hotplugging SATA recently, and as I |
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understand it hotplugging is a part of the SATA specification in a |
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way that it's not in EIDE (or even SCSI?). But what I read also |
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stated that SATA controllers are not _required_ to support hot- |
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plugging, either. This makes choosing an SATA more complicated, of |
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course - I can't hep thinking it's easiest to plump for a SATA |
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controller advertised to do hot-swap hardware RAID - I imagine this |
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might be better marketed than a regular SATA controller that happens |
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to support hot-swapping (but no RAID). |
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Due simply to the price of disks we'd tend to choose hot-plug SATA |
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RAID over hot-plug SCSI, if were to buy new. |
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Stroller. |
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-- |
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