Recognizing A Drive Failure; Replacing A Failed Drive; Summary Of The Installation - Areca ARC-1880 Series User Manual

HARDWARE INSTALLATION
2.5 Hot-plug Drive Replacement
The RAID controller supports the ability of performing a hot-swap
drive replacement without powering down the system. A disk can
be disconnected, removed, or replaced with a different disk without
taking the system off-line. The RAID rebuilding will be processed
automatically in the background. When a disk is hot swap, the
RAID controller may no longer be fault tolerant. Fault tolerance will
be lost until the hot swap drive is subsequently replaced and the
rebuild operation is completed.

2.5.1 Recognizing a Drive Failure

A drive failure can be identified in one of the following ways:
1). An error status message lists failed drives in the event log.
2). A fault LED illuminates on the front of RAID subsystem if
failed drives are inside.

2.5.2 Replacing a Failed Drive

With RAID subsystem drive tray, you can replace a defective
physical drive while your computer is still operating. When a new
drive has been installed, data reconstruction will be automatically
started to rebuild the contents of the disk drive. The controller
always uses the smallest hotspare that "fits". If a hotspare is used
and the defective drive is exchanged on-line, the new inserted
HDD will automatically assign as a hotsapre HDD.
Note:
The capacity of the replacement drives must be at least as
large as the capacity of the other drives in the raid set. Drives
of insufficient capacity will be failed immediately by the RAID
controller without starting the "Automatic Data Rebuild".

2.6 Summary of the installation

The flow chart below describes the installation procedures for 6Gb/
s SAS RAID controllers. These procedures includes hardware instal-
lation, the creation and configuration of a RAID volume through the
McBIOS/McRAID manager, OS installation and installation of 6Gb/s
SAS RAID controller software.
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