[CentOS] CentOS 7 and Areca ARC-1883I SAS controller: JBOD or not to JBOD?

Sat Jan 21 06:16:58 UTC 2017
Keith Keller <kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us>

On 2017-01-20, Valeri Galtsev <galtsev at kicp.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>
> Hm, not certain what process you describe. Most of my controllers are
> 3ware and LSI, I just pull failed drive (and I know phailed physical drive
> number), put good in its place and rebuild stars right away.

I know for sure that LSI's storcli utility supports an identify
operation, which (if the hardware all cooperates) causes the drive's
light to blink.  I'm fairly sure I've used this feature on 3ware
controllers as well.  I use this even when I'm sure of the failed drive
number and am the only sysadmin for these systems, because I don't even
trust my own memory.  :)

This is one reason I prefer RAID6 over RAID5: if you have one failed
drive in your array, and you pull the wrong one, your RAID5 is now gone,
but your RAID6 is still functional.  The odds are with you in a RAID10
but you could get unlucky.  (Not that you want to rebuild two drives at
the same time but it's still better than losing the array.)

--keith

-- 
kkeller at wombat.san-francisco.ca.us