[TriLUG] How do you know when a RAID array is BROKE?

Dave Sorenson dave at logicalgeek.com
Thu Mar 16 15:45:18 EST 2006


That blinky light saved my butt a while back. Blue flash is good.. 
orange flash is bad.

Dave

Matt Nash wrote:
> In the case of Dell's hardware RAID, it quietly implodes and fails to 
> flash the handy "I'm broken" light on the front of the drive.
>
> David Brain wrote:
>> Using software raid there is a util called 'mdadm' that as one of its
>> (many) functions can be set up to email you in the event of a disk
>> failure.
>>
>> And, yes, you could alternatively just write a script to monitor the
>> logs (or /proc/mdstat for software RAID).  This is probably the only
>> way to do it for hardware RAID, absent some provided software.
>>
>> By default, you'd probably never know, although disk performance might
>> drop, until enough drives failed to kill the array - this is probably
>> not the way you want to be notified.
>>
>> David.
>>
>> On 3/16/06, Randall Barlow <randall_barlow at ncsu.edu> wrote:
>>  
>>> With all the RAID stuff lately, one question came to mind (from someone
>>> who has never used RAID but is thinking about it :)): how do you know
>>> when a disk has failed?  Do you just have to keep reading the logs, or
>>> do you configure the system to drop you an e-mail or what?  What 
>>> does it
>>> do by default?
>>>
>>> -- 
>>> Randy Barlow
>>> Research Assistant
>>> Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
>>> North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC
>>> randall_barlow at ncsu.edu
>>> http://www.electronsweatshop.com
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>     
>



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