LSI Raid 6 question

[daniel1926]

Forgive the newbie question please!

I recently purchased a Supermicro server with the following components:

2 x E5-2670
192gb ram
64gb SSD system drive
12 x 2tb seagate SAS HDDs in raid 6
Fujitsi RAID 9260-8i (LSI based)
Windows 10

And the following chassis and backpane:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/2U/826/SC826BA-R920LP.cfm?parts=SHOW#jump

After setting the machine and getting everything up and running, I took out one of the HDDs to see what would happen (this is the first time that I have had a hot swappable system so my curiosity was killing me). After re-inserting the drive back into it's bay, the the red light has stayed on for the last 12 hours (as well as the blue light).

At first, I thought that the machine was rebuilding the raid array, but this has been going on now for too long for that to be the case based on what I have read on the internet. Windows file explorer indicates that the total storage is the same as it was before I removed the drive. I tried restarting the machine, but that hasn't helped.

Does anyone have any experience with something like this? Why is the red light on? What do I have to do to get things back to normal? I haven't started to use the machine for the purposes that I purchased it and I am reluctant to do so until I get everything running correctly.

Thanks for the help!

 

[frowertr]

It's a decent sized array. All 24TB has to be re-read and then parity recalculated when an array member takes a crap and you go to rebuild the failed member. I've seen RAID 6 arrays take days to rebuild.

When you rebooted the server, did you go in to the RAID configuration menu? What about out of band access via IPMI? What does that tell you as far as RAID is concerned?

Looking at the manual, it doesn't even list a blue light for the drive carriers on page 3-4 which is odd. I'm guessing the blue light replaced the green light?

 

[frowertr]

What motherboard do you have with that chassis?

 

[master_shake_]

what does megaraid storage manager say about the drive?

post a screen shot of the storage manager.

you'll probably have to make it an unconfigured good drive and it will reinitialize it.

don't pull random drives out.

 

[daniel1926]

Ok. Lesson learned! I'm a student and super curious about everything related to computers and computer science. I had a little bit of grant money for a big project and I used it to get this machine. I have never used anything other than dell desktops and apple laptops so this has been a learning experience.

Do I have to do anything to get the raid card to rebuild the array or does it do that automatically?

 

[daniel1926]

I have the below linked supermicro motherboard. Given how much the prices have fallen on the e5-2670s I was able to get the whole system for about 1,200 which was almost exactly how much grant money I had. I'm pretty good with algorithms and complexity theory, but not as knowledgeable about hardware so I really appreciate all of the help.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/C600/X9DRi-LN4F_.cfm

 

[dbcooper1]

The controller has probably marked that drive bad after seeing that it's marked as part of an array, and rebuilt or is rebuilding your array using one of the spares. That red LED will stay on as the drive has been marked bad by the controller. Are you familiar with the 3ware CLI? you can view status and manually do things but be sure you know what the consequences are before proceeding.

 

[thesmokingman]

If I'm reading this right, whoa you put all 12 drives in the array? Ignore the lights and log into your RAID cards configuration page? When you pulled the working drive, you degraded the array. When you insert the drive back in, the drive is now a loose drive so it won't do anything with it. The array is now providing data using the stripe, ie. its calculating everything in other words working double time to provide the data, that uptime. You have to make it a hotspare, then the array will rebuild onto it.

But really what you should do is make the array with 10 drives and leave two as hotspare, or 11+1 if the size is more important.

 

[daniel1926]

Here is a snap shot of the megaraid controller

http://imgur.com/a/ZRdSS

As of right now, I have next to nothing on the drives. How do I go about setting up a raid 6 with 2 hot spares? (also, is my understanding correct that the hotspare will automatically be used by the raid controller to rebuild the array if anything happens to one of the drives that is in the array?)

 

[thesmokingman]

Here is a snap shot of the megaraid controller

http://imgur.com/a/ZRdSS

As of right now, I have next to nothing on the drives. How do I go about setting up a raid 6 with 2 hot spares? (also, is my understanding correct that the hotspare will automatically be used by the raid controller to rebuild the array if anything happens to one of the drives that is in the array?)

Yeap. Turn off the annoying beeper alarm, and you'll never even know its happening underneath.

Hmm, there should be an auto create array feature, that should have included an option for spares. I don't know the lsi menu but it's definitely there somewhere. The areca web front is much simpler which I'm used to.

 

[daniel1926]

Thanks guys. I've got it to the point where it is rebuilding. Hopefully, everything will work from here on out.

 

[master_shake_]

does the one drive still have a red circle on it?

if it does right click on it and set as unconfigured good.