View Full Version : Easy to swap out drives on a Raid system?
I've got a system configured with two 1TB drives in a Raid. The idea was, if one drive kaks, the good one allows me to contiue working until I swap out the bad drive with a new good drive.
First of all, will the system still run with one drive if the other one stops working?
Is it that simple to swap out drives, or is the process complicated requiring a technician's help?
Peter
04-19-2011, 06:54 AM
If you have set the raid up correctly, then if a drive fails it wont affect the system at all. You might not even noticed it has failed either.
The swapping out will depend on the OS and how your raid is set up, and if you have hot plug drives etc.
At boot up, the initial "green drives" didn't synch properly and only ran on one dive till they were replaced with "blue drives" and a software tweak - then things went well.
Win 7 OS - but don't know if the drives are hot plug. I would suspect not. I just wondered if one went bad, I could swap out the drive with a new one, but didn't know if the system would do the formatting and synching etc.
Peter
04-20-2011, 09:24 AM
I have not used Win 7 enough to get precise details, but assuming you are using raid 1 via Windows i.e. a software mirror. Then you can take the failed drive out, install the new one, and tell it to create a mirror, in pretty much the same way as setting it up in the first place.
Some of the better servers will automagically do things, but in a desktop PC im guessing the hardware will be basic, and I also expect you dont have hotswap drives, which means you need to turn the power off to change the drives.
A hardware raid controller will require a similar procedure as the software mirror.
Generally the way I have always done it is, remove the drive physically, insert new drive, tell the raid software component to format and use the new drive as if it was the old one. This then takes "a while" to replicate the data onto the new drive in the raid format you have used.
There are quite a few articles on the web on how to set-up Raid 1 on Win 7, so if it does happen, read an article and decide yourself if you are happy to make the changes. The trick will be understanding your set-up in the first place, e.g. hardware v software mirror, and what level of raid. I expect it is what is typically called raid 1, but with modern motherboards raid can be on that or software.
alphaomega
04-22-2011, 05:21 AM
First you need to tell us what RAID you have. There are many ways to setup RAID. If you have just RAID 0, which is two drives mirroring each other then replacing faulty rive is simple. Switch computer of, remove power lead replace drive (needs to be same size or bigger), restore power and start computer. BIOS will then tell you it needs to restore RAID. At 1TB it will take possibly few hours if the drives were full. This has nothing to do with Windows. If you have set RAID in Windows, same procedure apply anyway. You must switch of computer and remove power lead. Not doing so you risk damage to components. If you have RAID 5 with host swap drives, you just remove the drive and replace. It still will take lot of time to rebuild the RAID. Hope you know now.