RAID 5 Reconfiguration

I will be out much of today, but will try and communicate as much as possible.  Thank you for assisting.

Let me see if i understand this correctly. You have a drive that failed in bay1 and could not get the new drive to work in that bay. You had an open slot in bay 5 so you put the new drive in there and wish to add it to the array?

I believe you can do this using ACU.

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/ProLiant-Servers-ML-DL-SL/Expand-or-extand-array/td-p/3915158#.VJl7Xq7I

However i don't know if you can simply relocate a drive bay. That may require a complete raid reconfiguration.

yes , that is correct

I would like to just make bay 1 become bay 5 and let the array rebuild , freeing the hot swap , or make the hot swap drive the permanent replacement , and then then let the new drive be the hot swap.

are you 100% sure that the new hard drive you tried works? I have been given replacement hard drives before that were bad. It doesn't happen very often that a single bay can go bad unless the raid controller goes bad. I would try another hard drive before trying anything else.

just assign the new drive to be a hotspare and it will automagically get included in your degraded RAIDset

Wow. That's almost too easy. I will try that

Gerald, So to be accurate.  If I assign the new drive to be a hot spare  the currently engaged hot spare in bay4 will no longer be a hot spare, but it will become just a drive in the array ?  Will the assigned drive in bay 1 drop out ?

mate,

Gerald may have a right (formally), same ware as my thoughts, just add a Hot Spare (this new hdd in bay 5) to that array and it should accept new Hot Spare, BUT...
- it will not set an active Hot Spare as an normal array member at all and...
- additionally as I know HP SA ACU (with controllers like HP P400/P600/P800/P410/P420i) will not let you add any Hot Spare when Array is not in ONLINE/ACTIVE status, You will probably see FAILED or DEGRAGATED state (HP Calls it different in different arrays, sometimes ARRAY with a SPARE) because there is still no 1 hdd that is a member of an array :(( I know it's not flexible at all, main HW vendors are too much conservative. I don't have an HP E200i controller so can's see how it looks like there (If you can make a screenshoot from your ACU?, like my in attachment).

On my configuration (HP P800 with ACU CLI) I can't add a hotspare from CLI even with a "forced" parameter, via command like this:
controller slot=3 array A add spares=allunassigned forced
The response is: "This Configuration is not supported with a current configuration..." so I have 1 unassigned drive and Array A in ARRAY with SPARE state, but I'm not sure how it will looks like on your controller HP SA ACU CLI, You can try, CLI should be the same.

Also when I try command to remove a spare it not working at all:
controller slot=3 array A modify spares=none
and
controller slot=3 array A remove spares=all
The response is the same: "This Configuration is not supported with a current configuration...", so there is a possibility that it can't be done...(but I'm limited to old P800 controller, can't test it now on the newer one).

regards
NTShad0w
HP-SmartArray-ARRAY-with-Active-HotSmare

Zindel1 . i am 100 % sure that my new drive works as it came up and ready in slot 5.

Dawid,   From your input it sounds like I can add a 2nd Hot Spare  but I won't be able to change the first hot spare to be a normal drive in the array.  Also , I won't be able to remove the logically failed drive from the array???
Am I reading this correctly?


Also, .. Gerald can you elaborate on your comment.

Thank you all for your input.        Happy Holidays!

Well , Better late than never, sorry for the delay. It turns out that reseating the array cable in the back of the array controller fixed my problem. I put the drive I put in slot 5 back to slot 1 and all is well.   Personally I think it sucks that we can't add drives to replace damaged array  hardware without replacing that cage. oh well, thanks for your help.

atredo,

I also not happy that main vendors are so conservative to changing drive slot or just adding a new hotspare to drive that are using one active yet or just make active hotspare a normal drive :((, some smaller vendors like areca, 3ware, lsi or adaptec are more flexible with that, probably HP have their own reasons why not change this for so long.

Good that You found a solution with cable mate.

best regards and HNY 2k15 !!!!
NTShad0w