Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 11:13:37 -0700 From: "Alex Franks" <arfranks@gmail.com> To: "Alex Zbyslaw" <xfb52@dial.pipex.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Hot-Swapping hard drives on Dell PowerEdge 2850 running FBSD 5.5-PRE Message-ID: <2f488c030606231113i2b9b4bdcsa1b4192be54b9011@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <449BAE45.7030705@dial.pipex.com> References: <2f488c030606221106q4183de17gbff80d696f704505@mail.gmail.com> <449BAE45.7030705@dial.pipex.com>
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On 6/23/06, Alex Zbyslaw <xfb52@dial.pipex.com> wrote: > Alex Franks wrote: > > > Hello all, > > > > I'm getting ready to install 2 identical drives into the available > > drive bays in my 2850. However, it would be highly preferable that > > this machine NOT be shut down in order to install these drives. I know > > from looking at the docs that these drive bays are hot-swappable, but > > I'd like to know before I attempt this that someone else out there has > > successfully performed a hot-swap or hot-install of drives on a 2850 > > or comparable Dell PowerEdge running FreeBSD. > > RAID-1 I assume and PERC 4e/Di. Yes, did it when testing fresh > machines. The controller BIOS has a setting for how much resource to > allocate to the recovery of the inserted drive (0?-100%); the lower you > set it the slower it will recover the disk, but the higher you set it > the slower the machine will go. I think we went for 70% as the machine > never gets *that* heavy disk usage. > > If the machine isn't live yet, then just do a basic install from CD (<30 > mins) and then try the hotswap test. That way you can't lose any data > even if something goes wrong. > > My advice with these machines is never to swap any disk with the machine > off - the controller gets confused. Stick with hotswapping and it seems > fine. I think you can set up an auto-spare so that if a disk fails the > array is rebuilt automatically using the spare. > > Use sysutils/megarc for monitoring the RAID from BSD. > > --Alex > > > Thanks for the input, The drives hot-plugged just fine. The machine was live when I plugged the disks and still is right now. I'm trying to avoid another trip to the colo today to (safely) reboot by finding out if/where the drives are loaded at the hardware level and how I can go about mounting them to logical partitions. At this point, I'm not as concerned about getting the 2 drives into RAID1 since they're going to be used for backup purposes and will not be used in a high volume capacity (for now), and since this would almost certainly require a reboot. I *know* rebooting is preferable, but I'm experimenting here, and uptime is pretty important since the server is the main mysql box for a handful of websites. The controller is a Perc 4e/Di as assumed, and I'm still a little unsure as to whether the 2 drives that shipped with the machine are currently set up in a RAID array. The current filesystem is mounted on /dev/amrd0s1[a-f] and I would expect to find the new drives named similarly after using some useful utility that I'm unaware of. Any thoughts? Thanks again. Alexhome | help
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