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Why Won't Dell Virtual Disk Add Newly Replaced Drive to Restore RAID6 Non-Degraded State

We have a Dell MD1420 connected to a Dell R730. This morning, we received an idrac email that one of the disks in a RAID6 virtual disk was bad, We replaced it (1.2tb) at around noon. Green lights. I assumed it would sync back into the RAID6 and fix the "degraded" state, It's now five hours later and the virtual disk still hasn't added the new drive back to the RAID6 configuration. ("Remaining Redundancy =1). Is this just a latency issue due to rather large drives or something else? "

David Johnson, CD

did you do a hot swap like you're supposed to?

bhunger

ASKER

Yes, removed the bad drive and replaced it with another with same model number. Curiously, the idrac sees the drive as "encryption cable", "Ready" and under the "setup" menu is allowing us to make it a Global Hotspare, It just isn't adding to the RAID6 group.

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Seth Simmons

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bhunger

ASKER

I considered that, but wouldn't that make the it a degraded raid6 with a hot spare? Then, the hot spare would kick in I guess, but that seems off. It should start the rebuild right away, shouldn't it?

bhunger

ASKER

I'm thinking about trying a different replacement drive.

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Philip Elder

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bhunger

ASKER

Refurbished but the controller not showing it as foreign.

bhunger

ASKER

Okay, just returned from the data center.

I replaced the drive that was "ready" but not integrating into the degraded raid6 virtual disk.

I then added a two new drives (same make/model) to two unused slots in the MD1420.

One was designated as a global hot spare and the other designated a dedicated hot spare.

Idrac sent me emails confirming both items.

I still have a degraded Raid6 vd though. Its only been about 20 minutes though. If I recall, however, I should get a message saying the rebuild from one of the hot spares is underway.

bhunger

ASKER

Finally solved. The hot spare had kicked in and was rebuilding at an incredibly slow rate. Normally one of the 600gb/15k drives take about an hour to rebuild, this 1.2tb/10k drive took about 20 hours. I should have carefully checked the physical disk "progress percentage" but the way idrac presented it, it looked like there was no hotspare, just a Raid6 virtual disk. Thanks!