Data loss.. not fun

[gerbiaNem]

So I just lost 3tbs of fun stuff on my array... the important stuff was backed up.. so I'll have to redo my hd movies.. no big deal. But here is something you should watch out for...

I have 8 of the WD greenpower drives on a perc 5i. I kept seeing drive 2 of 0-7 dropping out, and at first I thought it might be a cabling issues since the drive kept being able to come online.. that didn't fix it..

next I thought that maybe when I was enabling WD TLER when I first got the drives, I missed one.. I checked the WD TLER settings for all drive (all good).. CAUSED THE PROBLEM.

What I did was to shut down the computer and test out the drives 1 by one through a dos boot disk on another computer.. this shouldn't be writing any data to them, windows isn't even loading.. When I returned the checked drives to the perc 5i in the exact order they were in before (shouldn't make a difference, but jic), the perc 5i didn't detect a single one of the drives as part of the old array. It thought they were different drives.

Just a hint of warning that running WD TLER scan (not change) might make your drives identify differently to your array... I know for next time.

 

[alamone]

I assume you already scrapped the old array and rebuilt it from scratch, but the PERC doesn't have some kind of rescue function where you can rebuild the array w/out initializing the disks? That usually fixes any metadata problems where the actual data on the disks is still good.

In general, when I have to use a raided disk externally to flash firmware or whatever, I only do 1 at a time, and make sure the raid card doesn't freak out after the 1st disk trial run. If it's a raid5 or 6, even if it freaks out it's not too big a deal, but yeah... cautionary tale for others. Even if you think it's completely a read-only operation, it might be updating, for example, SMART data on the drive, which the RAID card might detect and figure that the disk has been tampered with externally and should no longer be recognized as a good disk in the old array. It depends on how finicky the RAID stack is - since the PERCs are based on the LSI Logics, and the LSIs are very conservative about data protection, they would likely flag a disk as bad if you merely took it out and connected it to a secondary PC.

 

[thebeephaha]

The Perc cards are a bitch sometimes. I've used them extensively with good success overall but have had some issues along the way.

TLER definitely can mess with the Perc. I've had similar happen to me.