5 Essential Tips For Your RAID5
As the cost of drives become cheaper, and capacity is expanded, it is not surprising to find the popularity of RAID5 systems increasing.
However, like any other computer component, they are subject to failure.
Follow these essential tips to ensure you keep your RAID running smoothly, and your data intact.
1 - Backup Regularly
RAID5 is not a substitute for regular proven backups.
RAID5 cannot prevent problems occurring from deleted or overwritten files, formatted partitions, file structure damage, virus activity or user error.
RAID5 is designed to be hardware fault tolerant, not software fault tolerant.
Restoring from your backups is sometimes the only method of recovering from logical data problems.
Also, do not backup from your RAID5 to another file, directory or partition on your RAID5 - if your entire RAID5 fails over, so does your entire data set.
2 - Maintain Drive Comfort
Multiple drives all spinning concurrently can generate a lot of heat.
Be liberal with your cooling methods, a single fan is the absolute minimum, better to have a fan blowing through the spacing between the drives, and a second fan helping to exhaust the warm air.
Also be diligent in dusting out your enclosure as computer fans have a nasty habit of bringing any outside dust inside the case where it can settle on components, raise temperatures and cause electrical damage.
3 - Monitor RAID Status
Most major software RAID programs and hardware RAID card manufacturers can create logs detailing all sorts of useful information on your RAID.
Ranging from performance values to outright failure notification, it is wise to use these logs to your advantage
For example, they can inform you that a drive has been dropped from the array perhaps through a bad data cable and is no longer detecting.
Without any warning you may not notice this failure since your RAID will simply continue running in degraded mode until the problem is repaired.
Extra tip: Setup a periodic, automatic email of the log files to your email account to ensure that you are on top of any problems that may arise during the day to day running of the system.
4 - Keep A Spare Identical Drive
It is only a matter of time before a drive in your RAID5 starts to degenerate with read errors, or fails entirely due to motor failure or the click of death.
Thanks to RAID5 reliability you can counter this by replacing the failed drive without too much effort.
Before, you simply power down and replace the drive (or hotswap) ensure your backups are in working order, because Murphy is currently eyeing your RAID which now has zero tolerancy for failure.
Replacing the drive with the exact same model will ensure the same performance from your RAID as before the failure occurred.
Secondly, if your RAID does happen to sustain a multiple drive failure from which you cannot recover, a power surge comes immediately to mind, having a spare drive readily available for parts for a specialist data recovery laboratory may save you time and money.
5 - Label Your Drives
When it does come time to replace a drive in your array, it pays to know the exact one you should be replacing.
More often than not further problems are caused by accidently replacing an incorrect drive, which can 'confuse' many controllers - even after drive order is returned.
Do yourself a favour and label the drives as they are marked in the controller card or software configuration you use.
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