Hi, I've recently had a drive die in one of our R8 arrays. I can see the drive ID from the Promise Utility and that they are Seagate 4TB drives but I can't find the exact model of drive on the net anymore althought there are similar ones available. Does it matter if I replace the dead drive with another 4TB Seagate drive that is not the exact same model as the one currently in there? Does Promise recommend a certain drive for this?
Thanks,
Andi
Hi Andi,
Ideally, all the drives in a raid array should be of the same type, but as time goes by, at some point every hard drive will become discontinued. So eventually, a failed drive will have to be replaced by a different drive.
To keep things as consistent as possible, it's a good idea to use the same hard drive family if possible, or the same manufacturer if possible.
But I have an array with 750GB Seagate drives (remember those?) and several have failed and been replaced with 2TB WD drives and everything seems to be working well enough.
Of course, you can't mix spinning drives and SSDs. And you can't replace a drive with a smaller drive, and if you use a larger drive, the extra space won't be usable.
Great thanks, yeah, I think the exact model of Seagate Barracuda has been discontinued but I can still source the newer version of the same model on Amazon.
Originals were ST4000DM000 and Amazon has ST4000DM004. Same manufacturer, same family, same capacity, just slightly different serial number so I think I should be ok with this.
Thanks for your reply.
Andi
Just to follow up on this now that I have oredered a replacement drive which is arriving tomorrow; I have seen other posts about the process for installing and rebuilding the array, they all say to add the new drive as a hot swap i.e. while the power is on. Should the old (dead) drive be removed with the power off or should all of it be done "live"?
Thanks,
Andi
Hi Andi,
As long as you can positively identify the drive (red light on drive carrier or position by PD number, the drives are enumerated with PD1 at the top and PD2 next drive down, etc, etc...) you should be good to hot unplug the bad drive and hot plug the replacement drive. A rebuild should start automatically.
If a rebuild does not start, you can start it from the background tasks section of Promise Utility. If that is not working, open a terminal, type 'promiseutil' and send me the output of this command...
array -v
and I will send you the CLI command to start a rebuild.
Great, thanks for your help!
Andi
