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SATA raid automatic rebuilding.

V

Vyruz

Member
Hi,

My company has to upgrade their systems to SATA hard-drives because of the decreasing availability of PATA drives...

They've charged me to integrate this new hardware, to find a RAID 1 (mirror) solution for SATA disks, and i'm willing to add a few extra's while i'm at it...

The big advantage of SATA is that it's hot-swappable, and because our systems are used to operate petrol stations, so downtime is critical to our systems.

So what i want to do, is integrate a RAID card, which features automatic rebuild.
So that if a hard disk crashes, a technician would just have to replace the bad hard-disk, and the rebuilding would automatically be done in the background, downtime will be 0.

I've tested a few drives so far, but they all do the rebuilding on a driver level.
The problem is that our software is highly customized, and interaction with third party drivers is mostly impossible, because they will not give us the source code, and claim we should use their interface to do the necessarry configurations.

So i'm looking for a controller which will do the rebuilding on a hardware level.
I'm thinking of a configuration in the BIOS of the controller, that will enable the rebuild, then when a hard-disk is replaced, the rebuilding will automatically begin, without any necessary user interface.

Does anyone know which RAID controllers would allow this, if any at all?

thanks in advance
 
Newegg carries external RAID enclosures with USB and faster eSATA interface, have you looked at those? They would appear to the PC as a single drive, and the eSATA would not need any PC drivers at all.

If the PC doesn't have eSATA motherboard connector (most don't yet) you can buy SATA -to- eSATA adapters that send a motherboard SATA connector to a slot cover bracket.
 
external storage is not an option, because for some reason station owners or operators will always try to find a way to mess up the system.

example:
-cases with external USB slots are dissapproved because of possible tampering
-CDROM drive is locked by software to prevent access.
-system is connected to a UPS to ensure safe-shutdown at power failure, however we have to use backets that bolt the power cables to both the UPS and the PC because otherwise ppl will unplug the cables in order to reboot the system.

So external storage will surely be tampered with...

Today i had a look at the promise Fasttrak TX2300 , it features 2 SATA connectors and RAID 0-1-10-JBOD configurations.
When i install the software, i can see that it will automatically rebuild the mirror when one disk is unpluggend and replaced by a new one (on the fly!).
But the question is, will it do this without the software...
 
Originally posted by: Vyruz
... When i install the software, i can see that it will automatically rebuild the mirror when one disk is unpluggend and replaced by a new one (on the fly!).But the question is, will it do this without the software...
Click to expand...

You probably answered your own question. When you say "software" are you sure you are not referring to the Promise Fastrack BIOS? That is what rebuilds on my system. Without that BIOS loaded, the RAID array won't be seen. That suggests to me that it would have to be installed on every machine unless you have a WAN with server and workstations.

Anyway - one easy way to find out. Try it and see.
Click to expand...
 
I'm a bit surprised that your company is having problems finding PATA drives. Newegg.com lists 57 SATA drives andI 56 PATA drives in stock. What kind of availability issue are you seeing?

Those PCs with PATA drives are likely to only be useful for a few more years, anyway. Instead of upgrading every PC to SATA, wouldn't it be cheaper to buy a bunch of spare PATA drives to keep those PCs functional until they are replaced with new ones? Doing the hardware installs, creating the RAID arrays, and migrating all the data and programs is going to be awfully pricey, and it won't extend the life of those PCs.

I don't have experience with the FastTrak controller, but, in general, even the lower-end PATA RAID cards (like the HighPoint RocketRAID cards) will rebuild an impaired RAID 1 array on their own when you insert a new drive. With no software installed on the PC.

Be sure to doublecheck the hotswapping capability of any SATA RAID card you chose. Hotswap of SATA is not a 100% thing yet.
 
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