Re: Raid 1 action on failed disk?

[David Brodbeck <brodbd@u.washington.edu>]

On Dec 19, 2007, at 4:50 AM, S Scharf wrote:

> I am running a Debian 3.1 (Sarge) server with Raid 1 mirroring on  
> the disk drive.
>
> Recently, one of the disks failed. The system sent root a proper e- 
> mail notification of the failure. Unfortunately,
> the system seemed to continue to try to use the disk and operations  
> slowed to the point that the only thing I could
> do was to power the system down and physically remove the bad drive.  
> I had thought to check the mdadm status
> and remove the failed drive from the array by command.
>
> My question is shouldn't the Raid system have removed the drive for  
> me after it had failed? Why was the system still
> trying to do operations on it after noticing the failure? Was (is)  
> there something wrong with my raid configuration?

Are these IDE drives?  Were they on the same cable?  IDE is kind of  
"fragile" -- a bad drive can cause problems with accessing the other  
drive on the same cable.  Ideally you want the two drives in a RAID 1  
setup on separate cables -- this will give better performance, as well.