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a raid 0 failure or it was just taken away?
Hi Community,
I got this dedi from ChicagoVPS 4 days ago. It came with four 1T drives.
The raid card was old , dell 5/i . I had to use raid 0 to make it work with the system. (Esxi 5.1)
Today, I found the system failed. I checked the Perc 5/i panel. it says 1 drive is missing.
I'm not very familiar with this panel. in the panel it's showing "missing"
Could anyone tell me if this means 1 drive failed or it was just missing or taken away.
thanks
Comments
There's many ways the hard drive can fail, some of them will cause it to not respond and say Missing probably. Why don't you ask ChicagoVPS?
I asked waiting for reply. Meanwhile, I also want people who are familiar with this card explain a bit to me as well.
@kyaky Maybe it malfunctioned so badly it died completely (drive PCB board burned for example, including the chipset), so now it is shown as missing.
Anyhow the likely event of RAID0 failure means pretty much no data recovery. So, yeah.
Why did you need to use raid 0?
I worked with Dell servers for years with Perc's this is a common way that a dead disk will show up although it is more common to see the status: failed with a disk showing up as foreign simply reseating the drive may be enough but the chances are even if that works you will be on borrowed time and with raid 0 its not like you can swap and rebuild the array without data complete loss.
You probably don't need anyone to tell you this but raid 0 is never a great idea unless performance is way more important than redundancy
I know raid 0 has higher risk. I didn't expect the drives fail that quick. I thought the card could be gone before drives fail. This is dedi is just a toy. no important data
The drive must have been pretty sick already before I got it. It couldn't just die after 4 days if it was not sick enough. xD
I wouldn't use raid 0 if raid 5 , raid 10 worked.
This 5/i card wasn't compatible with the system. errors occurred a lot.
yeah 4 days is a bit... ouch!
Seems those model WD blues were produced between 2006 - 2010 so it may well have taken a beating unless its old-new stock.
Ask them for the pre install smart reports (which really should be done on any old reused disks) or when you get it back up run a quick smart report and find out what the spin up hours are.
Never had any issues with ESX and PERC 5's from memory though and it supports raid 5
thanks for your advice.
I tried raid 5 on ESXI 5.1. It worked but just extermely slow with these drives. like 20mb/s for writing.
Tried 5/i ,raid 0 , raid 5 , raid 10 on windows server 2008 / 2012. It wouldn't work. either wouldn't recognize the drive or hanged at 0% when installation. Strange.
That's odd, it would have been 4.x when I was using stuff that old to be fair.
http://vmsysadmin.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/using-perc-5i-with-esxi-5-2/
^^ may be of interest although I don't know how happy they would be with you flashing the card
But yeah from what I am reading just now they should not be providing you with a 5i if they knew it is ESX you want to run or at least you will have grounds to request a different card or that they flash the firmware for you.
Its a 2 minute job and will make your problems go away.
I have a PowerEdge 2950 with a PERC 5/i and it has no issues with Windows Server 2008r2 or 2012. Maybe your server's PERC has a faulty firmware image?
I don't know if they own these servers or they know what they are selling. I asked them to setup raid 10 when I purchase. They told me they never advertise hardware raid or anything like that. Probably they don't consider 5/i is a hard raid card or they don't know what they've got in the server. xD
probably. I don't know. Tried many times. Windows wouldn't recognize the drive.
This. I spend more money on a bit beefier CPU over a hardware RAID solution anytime.
Yeah. If it works properly in JBOD mode, and you're going to run Linux on it (or something with Software RAID support. I'm not sure if ESXi supports Software RAID or not, as I haven't played with it), just use Software RAID. Just remember to put /boot on a non-RAIDed partition.
VMWare doesn't support SW RAID.
Good to know then.
Indeed however you can geto it
You just have the 4 disks as separate data stores, create equal size (pre allocated) disks on each datastore and soft raid within the guest OS.
Not recommended but frankly I would rather do that than raid 0
I though about it too but I don't really care about data safe for only 1 month use. I would rather use raid 0 for faster speed. xD but no one knew, it would fail after 4 days. lol
Looking at the first screenshot it said "Foreign" means there is disk inside the server however the disk is part of another hardware raid config thus it is complaining missing in the second screenshot... you might want to check with your provider if someone has swap out another disk for you.
@ExpertVM yup you are correct however the Perc 5's will also say foreign if a disk dropps from the array momentarily, kind if a 'positive false'
If that is the case though you should simply be able to manage the foreign config and re add the disk to the array, if the OS boots that was it however in any event change the setup if you have not lost anything.
Ooops, looks like CVPS needed that drive to sacrifice to the backup gods
Seriously though, it looks like a disk failure.
I've used perc5 on an old enterprise server with raid 0 and never got a failure. It worked 7 years and nothing bad happened