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Vitechy

Member

Registered: 2010-06-29

Posts: 10

Mdadm Problems

Recently I got a couple of new WD Black hard drives to replace the aging WD Green HDD in my home server. My motherboard only has four sata ports so I removed the old software raid array and am now having issues creating the new raid array. The three hard drives are /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc.

When creating the raid array the following output is displayed.

[root@homeserver ~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid5 sdc1[3] sdb1[1] sda1[0]
      1953522688 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/2] [UU_]
      [>....................]  recovery =  2.4% (24314032/976761344) finish=203.9min speed=77814K/sec

unused devices: <none>

Is there any reason that sda1 is down? Is that the fault of the hard drive itself or is mdadm making it a spare and if so why is it not labeled with a (S) next to it?

After some time of the array building itself the following will occur:

[root@homeserver ~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4]
md0 : active raid5 sdc1[3](S) sdb1[1](F) sda1[0]
      1953522688 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/1] [U__]

Which is indicating that sdb1 has failed. Removing sdb1 from the array and testing it, the hard drive seems to to working fine.

[root@homeserver ~]# smartctl -H /dev/sdb1
smartctl 5.41 2011-06-09 r3365 [x86_64-linux-2.6.39-ARCH] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-11 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

I cannot find anything wrong with the hard drive. Is it possible that hard drive is failing to operate after prolonged use or something? Am I constructing the array incorrectly?

Any help is appreciated.

Vitechy

Last edited by Vitechy (2011-06-15 19:25:54)