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geriatricgeekFlag for United States of America

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Dell t5400 hard drive failure

I have a dell t5400 set up as a raid 0. one drive has failed. if I swap out the drive, how much configuration do I have to do? rebuild the computer software wise?
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Martin_J_Parker
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Dr. Klahn

When the system is rebuilt, if you intend to stick with RAID for the system drive, select RAID 1 or RAID 5.  A single drive failure on RAID 1 or RAID 5 should not bring the system down.

I have found it more effective from a support standpoint to run the operating system from a single drive and do frequent backups.  No RAID driver installation is required during system installation, no RAID configuration is necessary, and if the RAID hardware fails the system itself is not dependent on hardware that may no longer be available, and there is a possibility of migrating it to new hardware.
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the data is saved on network drives and the Raid 0 is set for speed of writing. The computer does boot and operate, very slowly of course, but it is giving warnings of the drive failure. that's why I have the question of if the system has to be rebuilt.
RAID 0 shouldn't be called RAID at all tbh :) . RAID 1 or 5 is your best future option.
Even RAID 5 can have bottlenecks.  The best option for both performance and reliability is actually RAID 10 if you can afford it - you get the advantage of RAID 0 stripe speed with RAID 1 mirror - but you will need to use 4 disks to get it!
In most cases, there should not be significant traffic to the system drive.  However, if write speed on the system drive is a critical issue, it may be more effective to stuff the system full of memory, confirm that delayed writes are enabled, and enable the large disk cache option.  That reduces dependence on high-performance disks.  
So the the hasn't failed yet but it's about to. Where it's a raid 0 when you replace the failing drive, you need to start from scratch, create a new array, reinstall the os, drivers and software. At least your data was on the network. Instead of a raid 0 if you are looking for speed over space, get an SSD they are smoking fast, but still relatively small and expensive.