[lug] RAID Controller Recommendations

[Glenn English]

On Sep 18, 2014, at 9:12 PM, David L. Anselmi <anselmi at anselmi.us> wrote:

> I had a similar experience years ago.  The only difficulty was that sda died and the server wouldn't boot sdb automatically.  So it took a trip to the BIOS to recover it.  But everything else was as expected.

Were those SATAs? My understanding is that there's no power down required -- that SATA drives are hot swappable because the ground pins in the connectors are a little longer than the others, so ground is always established. 

I did my RAID1 replacement under that assumption, and the server was on line through the process. Please tell me if I was just lucky :-)

Mine, fortunately, was sdb, so sda would have booted the system. But it scared me, so I started putting a grub on both disks during installation. I've checked it once, and the system booted with either one missing. There was some whinage from mdadm about a missing disk, but the system booted.

-- 
Glenn English