RAID - What happens when a drive fails?

[jrichrds]

I have a Dell workstation with integrated Dell SAS 5/iR (LSI MegaRAID?) RAID controller and 2 SATA HDs in RAID1. I'm not too sure what'll happen if one of the drive fails. How do I get notified? Will it only tell me during POST of the RAID bios, or does Windows 7 have some built-in notification?

And is replacing the faulty drive as easy as swapping in a new one, with the RAID controller doing the rest to resync the 2 drives?

 

[Emulex]

you usually run an agent to monitor the raid/configure it/ and alert you or set off a snmp trap to your monitoring station.

I just have it volley some emails to both of my mail servers which route to my email and pagers of important people.

the last failure was an ECC failure on a cache board due to a bad battery cable. reminds me why raid-5 is teh sux. once your battery is kaput or fails the system is unusable due to speed and fragmentation (chicken/egg)

 

[Seero]

I have a Dell workstation with integrated Dell SAS 5/iR (LSI MegaRAID?) RAID controller and 2 SATA HDs in RAID1. I'm not too sure what'll happen if one of the drive fails. How do I get notified? Will it only tell me during POST of the RAID bios, or does Windows 7 have some built-in notification?

And is replacing the faulty drive as easy as swapping in a new one, with the RAID controller doing the rest to resync the 2 drives?

Right after POST, the raid utility management will acknowledge you that the health of the raid is OK. Shall it is not the case, it will stay there telling you what is wrong, and won't proceed into windows until you fix the problem.

You can fix the problem in several ways, one of them is to revert the raid into single drive, the other is to purchase a new one and have the raid utility to clone the drive. Chances are, it will be cheaper to buy a drive double of the size then to buy the one that matches the original size, and the ones that remind in the raid are probably going to go soon, so it is wise to buy a new set of drives, backup, and image into new raid/drive.