My kids got their H1N1 shots (actually, snorts) today at school, reducing the likelihood that I will get the bug from them.  Thank goodness.  I have had my fill of flu for the year. 

Unfortunately, one of my arrays apparently needs a shot.  We have been working a problem with an iSCSI mounted array for nearly two weeks.  A drive failed — a 1 TB Seagate — and I replaced it waiting for the manufacturer’s vaunted auto rebuild to kick in.  Silly me, the array was set up a couple of years ago on a RAID 5, but we upgraded the drives last year when Seagate sent me a flock of what was then their latest PMR SATA disk product.  I never changed the RAID level, or the system didn’t support RAID 10, or whatever.  I am kind of blurry today and didn’t listen very closely when my guys were telling me their tale.

Anyway, one of the problems with the rebuild of the RAID set is that it keeps stopping then restarting apparently because my Windows server keeps pinging the virtual disks being presented to it from the array.  We have dismounted the iSCSI disks and restarted the rebuild.  See if that works.

The unit is an older VTRAK from Promise.  We had tested it a few years ago in our labs and used it for a long time as part of a test bed.  I acquired it awhile ago just to augment my mass storage capacity in my home media center.  Worked fine until now.

Tell you what, folks:  if you are building big general purpose arrays with big drives, best to put RAID 5 in the rear view mirror.  Rebuild times for anything over a TB per drive suck big time.

Tags: H1N1, Promise Technologies, RAID

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 19th, 2009 at 5:29 pm and is filed under News foo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.