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Simultaneous RAID drive failure

M

Mark R

Diamond Member
Had a problem with a server at work last week.

All the drives in the main array failed within about 100 ms of each other. Got a ton of SNMP alerts "physical drive status change 3046" - one for each drive in the array.

Anyway, someone calls HP, and they send out a dude, who diagnoses that all the hard drives have failed, replaces the drives and takes the old ones as RMA.

I'm just a bit annoyed, as that server was used as staging storage for all our raw data - due to the volume of data, we only archive and back-up selected compressed/processed data - but this was our only copy of the raw data.

It's not a catastrophic loss, but for 8 drives to drop out of an array simultaneously, it really does sound like some sort of software glitch, and a force-mount might have sorted it out.

Of course, no one actually thought to mention that the "repair" might have meant the loss of all data to the server. I got into work this morning and found the disk blank and had to raise a ticket with our IT dept to get the bad news.
 
Wow, that guy sucked. I would of started with the backplane and then forced the drives online. All 8 drives? completely unlikely. Likely it was one or two drives hosing the bus...
 
All 8 drives developed the same problem at the same time? Not at all likely; much more likely to be something power related or backplane.
 
Second what everybody else said. 1 Drive is expected. 2 is an unfortunate coincidence. 8 is a bad controller or backplane or something.

Which means if the tech just replaced the drives, it'll probably happen again soonish.

That said, shame on you for not having a backup. :colbert:
 
I fix Dell systems and this problem pretty much always warrants backplane / controller / cables being replaced, with drives forced back on, then sometimes having the ones marked bad be replaced one at a time.

The HP support tech on the phone that placed the call definitely did not do a proper diagnosis (can happen to all manufacturers really).

I also second, third, fourth, etc, what everyone here said so far. 😛

At least it wasn't catastrophic.
 
I don't think I've ever heard of 8 drives failing at the same time. I would say 8 failed drives is more unlikely than winning lotto twice in a row, which i have heard of.

Definately a failed controller, backplane or something along those lines.
 
Well, an electrical issue might take out 8 disks at once, but would probably also fry other parts of the machine.
So while 8 disks failing at once isn't that unlikely, there usually is a trail of destruction left behind if that happens, and just swapping the disks will do nothing 😀
 
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