Too Hot
Sunday 16th April, 2006 00:21 Comments: 2
I\'ll keep this brief as most people won\'t care. The first RAID array broke earlier tonight, making the noisy alarm go off, but I think Trish is out so I ddn\'t wake her this time. I tried to fix the array from the GUI in Windows, but I don\'t think it's possible, so I rebooted the fileserver and looked for my long VGA cable. I couldn\'t find it (I still don\'t know where it is), so I may have already taken it back to my parents\' house, and the PC doesn\'t do anything while it sits at the RAID controller BIOS screen asking me what to do. I was 99% sure that the default option is to "Continue" and hide any broken array, so I hit the return key a couple times and booted into Windows. Thankfully I was right, otherwise I could just have equally been blindly selecting the "Destroy" option that will lose all my data forever. And that was the array that isn\'t backed up anywhere (the vast majority of the second is backed up on my old spare 300Gb drive). I\'m pretty sure the problems are caused by the RAID controller cards overheating, as the heatsinks were sooooooo incredibly hot, so I\'ve put an 80mm Papst fan (nice and quiet) near the cards and hopefully they won\'t play up again. In a couple weeks it\'ll be sitting in a spare second bedroom at the new flat, so it should be a lot cooler than it is now, trapped in my cupboard.
Tania - Sunday 16th April, 2006 09:05 ohhhh, that would have been nastyyyyyyyyy. Keep the cupboard door open! :)
It got worse, just as it was about to finish rebuilding the array (I had foolishly closed the doors so I could watch a movie in peace) it started beeping again, as one of the other disks had allegedly played up - with a RAID 5 array you're allowed to lose one disk, but when you lose two or more you've usually lost all your data. So I had a little panic, restarted the PC, hit the return key a couple times, and when I got back into Windows the GUI showed all 8 disks in the array (normally when something goes wrong I get an addtional array with the same name and just the one disk that played up) and it said it was rebuilding. So I kept the doors wide open and left it to rebuild for something like just over 3 hours, and it's all happy again. I'll have to keep a careful eye on it over the summer though. And get that VGA cable back again.