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What is the solution for a faulty RAID controller and hard drive?

My customer has IBM x225 server & RAID controller card and three HDD (SCSI hot swap) installed. My question is what happens if the hard drive is faulty? Also, if the RAID controller goes faulty what should I do? Should I replace the card? Or do I have to do a configuration of HDD/os-Win2k server?

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If your hard drives are configured in a RAID-5 array, they will survive the loss of a single hard drive -- you can replace the faulty drive and the data on it will be rebuilt using parity information stored on the other two disks. The disk controller itself remains a single point of failure in this configuration; losing the RAID controller will cause you to lose the disk configuration stored on it. Most hardware manufacturers will allow you to back up the configuration onto a floppy disk or some other media so that you can restore the hard disk RAID configuration in the event that you need to replace the RAID controller itself.

This was first published in May 2005

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