Hi,
I could recently obtain a Dell Poweredge 2950 to play with. There are 4 300 GB Seagate SAS drives in them. However 2 discs are in the failed state. Therefore I deleted the logical volume that contained all 4 discs, created a new 2 disc RAID0 volume and installed a new Windows version on the machine. The data that was on the server did not need to be saved so installing a new OS was no issue.
Question: currently all 4 drives are spinning. Can I turn off the 2 bad ones? What would be the preferred method (remove from case, disconnect cable)
As I understood, the failed drive state is important in a RAID5 environment. All discs need to be the same size or the failover will not be ensured.
In a RAID0 environment having bad sectors isn't much of an issue, at least if they are marked bad. On desktop PC's chckdsk will do this.
Therefore, can I get rid of the failed drive status and reformat the drives and indicate what sectors are bad ?
many thanks, a novice server user without admin experience;
Maarten