What happens if the raid controller fails in a raid 1 array?

[tJuggernaut29]

I have some old dell r610s running raid 1 arrays.

What happens if the raid controller fails?

Will you still be able to boot from one of the drives if you remove the failed raid card?

[Electronics Wizardy]

I have setup a good amount of raid 1 on dell servers and you can just use the drive normally and see all the data, so it should just boot up fine.

 

But Id test it here to be sure. Also if you remove the raid card the drives aren't connected to anything in the server, so you need some sort of raid card or hba normally.

[tJuggernaut29]

5 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I have setup a good amount of raid 1 on dell servers and you can just use the drive normally and see all the data, so it should just boot up fine.

 

But Id test it here to be sure. Also if you remove the raid card the drives aren't connected to anything in the server, so you need some sort of raid card or hba normally.

what im getting at is that i am using brand new samsung ssds, but the raid card is quite old. so honestly if anything was going to fail, it would be the raid card.

Question is, what happens if the raid card fails? Do i need to replace it with an identical raid card, or can i just use any raid card to put the raid 1 back together? Or could i just ditch the raid card if it fails and plug one drive right into the mobo? thanks

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

21 minutes ago, tJuggernaut29 said:

what im getting at is that i am using brand new samsung ssds, but the raid card is quite old. so honestly if anything was going to fail, it would be the raid card.

Question is, what happens if the raid card fails? Do i need to replace it with an identical raid card, or can i just use any raid card to put the raid 1 back together? Or could i just ditch the raid card if it fails and plug one drive right into the mobo? thanks

 

If the raid card failed Id get the same model.

 

But you should be able to boot from if you plug it into your board.

 

But Id try it for yourself.

[Bdavis]

It depends on how it fails. Technically it could fail in a manner that it corrupts both drives. I'm don't know how likely that would be, just make sure you have a backup if it's data you care about.

[wseaton]

Depending on how it dies, it should be fine. However, a failing RAID card could potentially write a lot of garbage to critical file areas. Typically with a hard RAID 1 meltdown the drive might be rendered unbootable at worst case, but can be easily repaired from Windows, etc.

 

This is unlike RAID 5 where a meltdown can and will wipe all data and require data recovery services....if possible. This is also what causes major SAN failures. RAID 6 significantly reduces this chance.

[tJuggernaut29]

update to this. Did an experiment and it was a success

 

For RAID1 (for my system) simulating a raid controller failure, I removed the raid card and one of the two drives and it booted normally. 

I just plugged the SSD sata cable directly into the motherboard.

The drive worked fine without the raid controller or its buddy. 

Only thing that looked different with booting it it threw a bios popup saying the configuration changed, and to hit any key to continue, that was it.

 

This makes me feel good about running RAID1 for my critical data.

In theory I could lose both the raid card and one of the drives and still be fine.

 

this was tested with a Dell c6100 blade server, your mileage may vary.

This also assumes that if the raid controller fails, it doesnt corrupt anything