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I have 3 servers at 100tb.com that uses Softlayer's datacenter.

Two of them are in RAID 1. At least two of them have been working continuously for over a year, and they have high amounts of data written at the disk, all day long. So, the disks work a lot.

I'd like to know, what will happen when some of the disks fail. I know that the server will continue working without one disk working.

What I want to know is how will I know that one of the disks failed?

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    is it hardware RAID or Software RAID? Feb 25, 2011 at 12:16

3 Answers 3

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You should install monitoring software that checks the RAID status of your system.

Is it software RAID or hardware RAID? Which controller?

Windows, Linux or which operating system?

Perhaps there is already a monitoring software installed (and running?) that can be configured to check also your RAID status.

I use NAGIOS for this checks (and many more) but there are many other monitoring programs. See What tool do you use to monitor your servers? .

And, YES, it is secure to have discs in RAID! You always want to have RAID on a server! That's the idea, to have redundancy if a disc fails. If you don't have RAID then your system will be dead on a disc failure.

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  • "always" is a bit broad. Usually though, yes.
    – Sirex
    Feb 25, 2011 at 14:06
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    Note that RAID 0 is LESS safe then having no RAID at all. All the others 1-10 are safer than no RAID at all.
    – Chris Nava
    Feb 25, 2011 at 14:49
  • Well, RAID 0 is often seen as not really RAID ...
    – rems
    Feb 25, 2011 at 15:00
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Softlayer uses Adaptec controllers on all of their boxes and they install the arcconf software on them all.

You can run this as root to check everything about your controller and disks:

/usr/StorMan/arcconf GETCONFIG 1

If you just want to know of any issues check the "Status of logical device" line. It will show "Optimal" or "Degraded".

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depending on your controller you should be able to query smart data from each hardrive

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

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