RAID and hot swap drives

[michaeldjcox]

I have this company "Arbico Computers" in the UK quoting for a system with RAID and hot swap.

I would like to run hot swap mirrored drives.

There telling me that they cannot support RAID with hot swap as it causes RAID fails even when drives are mirrored rather than striped.

There a 4 port RAID controller (make unknown no details here yet) and a JJ Hot swap SATA which I think is JouJye (exact model unknown)

This sounds like c**p to me does anyone have any experience that might explain why they might be suggesting this.

Michael

[sic0048]

Why the need for hot swap drives in the first place? I mean is pulling the system down for 10 minutes while you swap a drive really that critical? If we are talking a major corporation, then I can understand. It makes sense in critical business systems where the cost of downtime (even if just a couple of minutes) far outweighs the cost of the equipment. But for home use, hot swap drives (especially for system drives) is simply overkill.

This is of course just my personal opinion. But why spend all the extra money it takes to hot swap drives when you will rarely, if ever, use the function?

Edit - I'm not trying to be a prick here. I just don't understand the desire to have hot swap drives. It seems to be the rage, but few people probably actually use it ever, and I bet 99.999% of those that do could have simply shut down their machine for 10 minutes without any problems and done the swap that way.

[michaeldjcox]

True.

I only had one drive go in 3 years.

I can let the machine go down for ten minutes every three years.

Its part of the package really so trying to evaluate how it might be of use and if it cannot be used with RAID 1 then why indeed have it.

Michael

[brainbone]

Originally Posted by michaeldjcox

There telling me that they cannot support RAID with hot swap as it causes RAID fails even when drives are mirrored rather than striped.

Pulling a drive from a working RAID 1 (mirrored) set would cause the array to run in "degraded" mode -- but should keep limping along until you replace the drive and rebuild. As long as the controller supports hot-swap (and any self-respecting raid controller should), I don't see a problem.

What I would take from their response is "don't buy from Arbico Computers".

[jerryt]

I have a Areca ARC-1230 running raids 6 and you can remove two drives while Sage is playing back a HD recording without skipping a beat.

[Peter_h]

It really sounds like they don't know what they are doing.

Hot swap needs to be supported in the RAID card. Almost all good RAID cards will support this.

I just put this card in my WHS to RAID 1 the OS with a hot swap drive. When setting up the array the card gave me the option to add a drive or 2 as a hot swap for the RAID 1 array, (card has 4 sata ports).

I would look elsewhere for your purchase or build it yourself.

[KarylFStein]

Until recently, I was running three RAID-1 arrays off the ICH8R chipset on my motherboard with a couple 3-in-2 hot-swap cages. I can say that this 1) has worked great and 2) saved me an outage at least twice when a HDD failed. Maybe I should stop buying WD drives...

Anyway, because of the RAID setup, I was able to pull out the failed drive, run the WD diagnostics on it at my leisure to make sure it was a HDD problem, do an RMA on the drive, (both failed while still under warranty thankfully), and wait for the new drive to arrive. Total cost was about $6US for shipping + delivery confirmation and time. During all that, my server didn't have any sort of outage. The RAID ran in degraded mode, but it still ran. When I put in the new (refurbished) drive, I have to manually add it as a RAID drive in the Intel Matrix software, but then it rebuilt automatically and I didn't have to shut down the system. (I'm leery of WD drives now, but the RMA process has been good.)

I can't see going back to some method of 1) not being able to survive a single HDD failure, (not sure if it's just WD or newer drives in general), and 2) having to shut things down and unscrew a drive, (that's just superficial, but hot swap in my basement for maybe $160US for the cages just seems cool).

Total cost for what I do is pretty low and works. Sure, it's not the ultimate in benchmarked performance, but in the real-world I don't have any complaints. It's simple because most is on the MB, (my only add-in cards on the server are the two TV tuners and one ~$30 SATA controller based on a SiI3132 chip for the hot-swap backup drive for offsite storage), and comes at a low cost while still being easy to set up and use.

I don't see why any SATA RAID controller (including built-in software solutions like my ICH8R), wouldn't support hot swap. For my non-RAID SiI3132 card, I use a program called HotSwap! to "safely eject" the drive when I swap it out, (and some ~$15US hot-swap cage), but then I just slide the other drive in and it mounts automatically.

I echo the other comments to take my business elsewhere or DIY.