Possible RAID Failure – replacing a disk

[slipd]

Hey guys,

Got called to have a look at my mate's "slow" computer and although it was quite slow (3 GB / Q6600!) the first thing I noticed was the near constant system tray messages he was getting – see below.



Seeing as though the problem drive of the raid is being reported, is it simply a case of replacing that drive? It's a dell machine with a raid0 (1x 500gb WD and 1x 500gb seagate interestingly) but he’s used no where near that much storage; owns a busy shop and has only used 25gb in 3 years, I was going to suggest going to raid1 and just getting him another 500gb to keep things the same?

What I need to know is, is will I be able to change the nvidia raid settings (pre-boot) to raid1 will the single Seagate drive and get things up and running and then add the new 500gb when it arrives?

Any thoughts?

 

[Surveyor]

As it's RAID 0 you need to back up your mate's data now.

With 2 disks in RAID 0 no single disk contains all the data, it's spread across the 2 disks.

If one drive fails, and it looks like one is on its last legs, you lose all your data. The one remaining drive will not work on its own.

Again, back up all data immediately.

 

[spellen]

Okay, the problem with RAID-0 is that there is no redundancy and the data is striped across the disks equally. So if you remove a disk now, you are probably going to loose half the blocks out of every file. This is a bad thing.

What you probably want to get your friend to do is back-up *now* and as it's only 25 Gb, this shouldn't be too onerous. Then you might want to think about rebuilding with a RAID level which gives them some redundancy. You might also want to learn this mantra 'RAID is not backup...and RAID-0 is not RAID'

It's normally best not to mix different disk types in a RAIDset but actually, this happens a lot in big Enterprise class arrays where they will be dual-sourcing disks from different disk manufacturers. It's less of a problem than a lot of people think.

RAID-0 is fine if you want great performance and you are willing to accept that if you don't back-up, you are going to loose everything in the event of a failure. But friends don't let friends run RAID-0 without the obligatory lecture.

Just get him to backup onto something now....please!