RAID 5

[wesamess]

So I have a Dell PowerEdge 1600SC with a 4 hard drive raid 5 setup at work. 3 for raid and 1 as the hot spare. The hard drive in slot 0 has failed- no problem right? I have a hot spare. Well the hot spare status is green but the busy light isn't on so it has me worried. Did the array rebuild already? Did the hot spare not start? I ordered 2 new hard drives and they should be here by Friday but I am worried. There's a tape backup started on Monday and it's either incremental or differential. Either way I have a back up available in case another drive fails. Does the hot spare only become active when a second hard drive fails? I am a bit worried. My boss is more worried.

[LarkStarr]

do you not have software that you can check the status of your array on?

[grinder]

yeah dude, ya gotta have the storage management software installed and properly configured to give you email alerts and stuff.

[wesamess]

It's running server 2000 and the raid is hardware based. I didn't find any options/software that was already there to give me the option of emailing me updates. (My home pc does give me that option)

I installed a new drive today (hot swapped) and it looks like it's rebuilding. The hot spare still has no activity but is online. After the rebuild is complete, what will the hot spare be doing?

[BlueByte]

Sounds like your hot spare is not really setup as a hot spare. if the card has been setup to switch to a hot spare you should be notified in POST or in the Software Management suite for your card about a failed event, and the hot spare should auto rebuild. If that has not happened I would check your config in the management suite and go from there. If you don't have the software installed I would go to Dells website and get the one for your RAID card.

[LionRed]

How long is your rebuild taking?

Mine is taking 104hrs with 3.7TB of data being recovered..er saved....err piece of mind....w/e 104hrs to get there.

[wesamess]

I am not sure how long it will take as each drive is 73 gigs @ 10k rpm. I installed it hot 2 hours ago. Right now the LED status indicator is blinking green 3 times a second. According to this diagram, it means it's being identified. Does that start before the rebuild or after?

My home pc raid build took about 1.5 days and each drive is 2 Teras. I had to rebuild it once as one drive some how unplugged (whoops). I forgot how long that took. I think there was about 2 Teras used out of 5 at the time.

[BlueByte]

i think the best thing to do at this point is look at the raid bios or install the software. honestly it sounds like the dive is offline since you have not initialized it and by all other accounts hot spares were never setup properly by the way you described things(even hots need to be identified). you are going to get limited info from LEDs.