Re: 6618 drives for model 270

With V5R4M5 you can have a hot spare spinning. The system will then detect the failure, and the hot spare replaces the drive that failed.

Previous to that if the drive in slot D22 files then you MUST pull THAT drive and put a replacement into that specific slot. Any other drive simple becomes an 'additional' drive not a 'replacement' drive.

As to not placing drives in or on the shelf personally I keep drives on the shelf and swap whole partitions in and out. I've not have any problems with this. While sitting the risk is stiction and while running the danger is wearout, failure, electrical zapping and such. You pays your money and takes your choice.

And not to pick nits but the longest part of the process for a replacement is the RAID rebuild not the formatting. The RAID rebuild requires all the other drives be read to calculate via parity what must be written to the replacement drive. THAT will take some minutes.....


- Larry

Joe Pluta wrote:

From: rob@xxxxxxxxx

Having replaced a few failed drives, I don't think the process is all that
tricky. Remember, you add it to the RAID set, THEN you add it to the ASP.

Hee hee... somehow, I get the idea that you've done it once or twice in the
past, Rob.

The longest process is when it then formats the drive as one of these
steps. So I don't think the hot live disk saves you anything. Might even
confuse the issue by trying to use D24 for what D22 used to do.

Makes sense to me. The only issue was that there is some discussion as to
whether keeping a drive powered up and spinning is better than having it sit
on a shelf cold. Those who have any opinion one way or the other seem to
think that it's worth keeping the drive spun up to avoid stiction (and the
old "gentle whack against the desk" fix).

The more I look at it, the more I think that five drives for reduced heat
and load and just keeping drives on the shelf should be fine. With regular
backups, my window of vulnerability is if a drive goes down while I'm on the
road; I can't replace the failed drive until I get back, and a second
failure trashes the machine back to the most recent backup. Even with an
extra drive in the cage, I still have the possibility of two drives failing
at once anyway, so I'm just reducing risk, not eliminating it.

Joe

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