RAID 6 Array

M

mgstu

New member
hey people, IVe got a 16 drive NETSTOR iscsi RAID 6 array, one drive was a hot spare, needed to swap a disc due to occasional read errors, pulled drive, wrong one, put back, pulled another wrong one, put back, left to rebuild... didnt leave long enough, pulled the right drive, and now its failed. bugger... any clever ideas, no drive had actually fully died, but it effectively had 3 pulled at once.. :( someone must have a clever idea : )

Cheers !
 
Jared

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
What's the actual model of the device? Is it just an external drive enclosure with a RAID host card inside the computer/server, or is it one of those thunderbolt / external PCIe type boxes? Or are we talking about a bonafide SAN like their NR330A?
 
M

mgstu

New member
Hi ! ok its a NETSTOR IBN-16R-SR with a card in it, so RAID6, 1 hot spare, and Iscsi to my PC... : ) so no not a real real SAN, but : )
 
lcoughey

lcoughey

Moderator
The first step in doing a safe recovery is to get a full sector-by-sector clone of each drive. It is never wise to assume that all the drives are healthy, especially if one has already been pulled because of bad blocks. The others may have bad blocks too, but haven't reported them because you haven't yet accessed them.
 
Jared

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
mgstu":2uu8xywr said:
[post]16258[/post] ts a NETSTOR IBN-16R-SR
Click to expand...

I think that is the same as the NR330A, it's just stock code of it pre-loaded with drives. So it is a SAN of sorts. But, if it has a hardware RAID card in it that's a good thing. Can you tell what the RAID card is? If it's something good like an Areca you can probably tell it to reassemble the array.

As Luke said though, getting a full clone of all the drives would be a good idea in case something goes really sideways.
 
Jared

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Actually looking deeper into the specs, seems that is has something like an Intel IOP 341 which is basically the same as a RocketRAID card. I think in the RAID GUI you should have an option to "Recover Array" which will try to assemble whatever set of drives are in there that appear to have the same parameters. Usually in situations like yours that should work. I know I've had issues with an enclosure randomly dropping drives offline and with Areca cards (which I always use) it's a pretty quick fix to do the recover array option and get it back online.
 
M

mgstu

New member
hey thanks for input ! the card you cant get into "as such" theres no vga ouput on box for example its all via the mgmt gui whihc dont have many options to say least,... : (
 
Jared

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
So that sucks then. Is it a RAID card you can pull out of the machine and plug into another computer, or is it built right into the motherboard?
 
Jared

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
Yes, because you'd need to get into the RAID GUI during boot of the machine, not the web interface which becomes available after it's booted up.

If it doesn't have a removable RAID card and there's no ports to connect a monitor/keyboard and get to the RAID BIOS, then I'm afraid the only option would be professional recovery. The good news is, I don't think it's a bonafide SAN like EMC or NetApp with its own proprietary OS and filesystem. My guess is it's just using some linux/BSD type of OS and creating an iSCSI target to the hardware RAID. If it is a true SAN, you don't even want to know what recovery is likely to cost. $$$$$

Is the data worth the cost of sending it out, or is it just a minor setback to restore from a backup?
 
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