Personal File Server Rebuild Thoughts

[NateTheITGuy]

My personal servers raid array failed a few days ago. It was set at Raid 5.. Yes I know, raid 5 is not a good solution. Well I replaced a failing drive and now my array is in a failed state. Swapping back to the original drive, still in failed state. Controller sees all drives at POST but array can't be rebuilt. Backup tapes are a few months old but can't restore or backup since BackupExec has expired..  Server is still running, just no secure storage for my data. I have a majority of my non critical data on my old server but critical data like family photos for the past two years are possibly gone.

 

I have parts to build a second server for backups at a remote site. Working on possible VPN between sites for backups.

 

Parts I have for new server:

Z270 board with Core i5 6400 - old I know

Dell quad port gig Nick for teaming

Used HP Sas card

 

Just need suggestions..

 

[leadeater]

Before you wipe the disks and rebuild connect them to standard MB SATA ports or an HBA and use Recover My Files to define a RAID 5 with those disks and scan for recoverable data, you'll most likely be able to get the majority of it back. You need to note down the stripe size and enter that in with the RAID 5 settings.

[DeaconFrost]

Who said RAID5 isn't a good solution?  If you only had one drive die and it was replaced, you should be fine.  The array should rebuild.  If not, you either swapped the wrong drive or you had a controller failure.  RAID5 is perfectly fine for a home server, but RAID never was and never is a backup solution.

[dalekphalm]

8 hours ago, DeaconFrost said:

Who said RAID5 isn't a good solution?  If you only had one drive die and it was replaced, you should be fine.  The array should rebuild.  If not, you either swapped the wrong drive or you had a controller failure.  RAID5 is perfectly fine for a home server, but RAID never was and never is a backup solution.

Agreed - though to explain why some people say it's not a good solution:

 

Most drives are rated with a specific MBF number (Mean time between failures), and larger HDD's are so large and take so long to rebuild an array, that statistically, you have a much higher chance of a second drive having some sort of failure during the rebuild than with older smaller drives.

 

How likely is that to be a real issue? None if you keep proper backups, and even so, odds are you likely won't have any issues still.

 

Personally I run a RAIDZ1 array, which is basically the same as RAID5 - with the added benefit of ZFS scrubbing the array periodically looking for errors or degraded SMART stats preemptively.

 

For home use, as long as important data is backed up, RAID5 is fine.

[leadeater]

5 hours ago, dalekphalm said:

with the added benefit of ZFS scrubbing the array periodically looking for errors or degraded SMART stats preemptively.

Hardware RAID controllers also do this too, but it needs to be an actually good one like from LSI. Sometimes Patrol Reads is disabled by default but this is something you want to turn on as it does the same thing,

[dalekphalm]

10 hours ago, leadeater said:

Hardware RAID controllers also do this too, but it needs to be an actually good one like from LSI. Sometimes Patrol Reads is disabled by default but this is something you want to turn on as it does the same thing,

Yep true - though I think this is something lots of people don't even check for - especially if it's a home lab situation.

[Windows7ge]

Like others are saying assuming you've pulled the correct disk and have an appropriate replacement there's no reason it shouldn't start rebuilding once you initiate it. Does it throw any particular error when it says it can't?

 

You also haven't explicitly stated if this was hardware or software RAID. Though it sounds like hardware.

[NateTheITGuy]

I do have an HP Sas card with a 4 port cable that I can swap in to the server to see if I can recover the volume. I will try when I get a chance. I am also looking at getting a dell Powevault MD1220 (old) I know.. so I can build a new volume that I can expand later and have more parity drives just in case.

 

Thank you for the suggestions.

[NateTheITGuy]

Well, I might just have bad luck with raid arrays. I ended up getting a dell power vault and 11 600gig 10k sas drives. I did have to get a new sas card since the one I had did not support raid 6. I had a volume with 5tb of space. I started to copy data to it and it looked like it was working fine. Today I checked on the copy status and it was frozen. Well I noticed that the volume was missing. I open the HP configurator and there it was three failed drives...

 

Im trying to get replacements but looks like I might have to start all over and re-create a new volume.