23

We have a Dell PowerEdge T410 server running CentOS, with a RAID-5 array containing 5 Seagate Barracuda 3 TB SATA disks. Yesterday the system crashed (I don't know how exactly and I don't have any logs).

Upon booting up into the RAID controller BIOS, I saw that out of the 5 disks, disk 1 was labeled as "missing," and disk 3 was labeled as "degraded." I forced disk 3 back up, and replaced disk 1 with a new hard drive (of the same size). The BIOS detected this and began rebuilding disk 1 - however it got stuck at %1. The spinning progress indicator did not budge all night; totally frozen.

What are my options here? Is there any way to attempt rebuilding, besides using some professional data recovery service? How could two hard drives fail simultaneously like that? Seems overly coincidental. Is it possible that disk 1 failed, and as a result disk 3 "went out of sync?" If so, is there any utility I can use to get it back "in sync?"

Improve this question
11
  • 21
    Yeah, big sata disks tend to do that. (Rebuilding 3 TB takes many hours while you are exposed to double-failures). So this is expected and it's why RAID-5 using such a configuration is absolutely not recommended.
    – MichelZ
    Commented Jul 22, 2014 at 14:54
  • 10
    Indeed. In an ideal world drive failure rates are randomly distributed. Practically, this doesn't happen - they are usually bought from the same batch and subjected to the same stresses, which means they all start to hit end of life at the same time. A sudden shift in loading can quite easily tip several 'over the edge', even before you start looking at unrecoverable error rates on SATA disks. Anyway - I'm afraid the bad news is, unless you can get one of those drives online, it's time to get the backups out.
    – Sobrique
    Commented Jul 22, 2014 at 14:56
  • 6
    serverfault.com/questions/339128/…
    – MichelZ
    Commented Jul 22, 2014 at 14:57
  • 5
    I know it doesn't help much now, but just FYI - the general consensus is to use RAID6 for drives larger than 1TB (atlest when we're talking about 7200rpm).
    – pauska
    Commented Jul 22, 2014 at 14:58
  • 2
    RAID 5 gives fault tolerance, but it's a compromise option - you have N+1 resilience, but if you have big drives you have a large window where a second fault can occur. RAID-6 gives N+2 fault tolerance, which is generally considered good (triple failure odds are a lot lower). However, you'll also find the failure rate of more expensive disks (e.g. not cheap SATA drives)
    – Sobrique
    Commented Jul 22, 2014 at 14:59

8 Answers 8

Reset to default
27

After you accepted a bad answer, I am really sorry for my heretic opinion (which saved such arrays multiple times already).

Your second failed disk has probably a minor problem, maybe a block failure. This is the cause, why the bad sync tool of your bad raid5 firmware crashed on it.

You could easily make a sector-level copy with a lowlevel disk cloning tool (for example, gddrescue is probably very useful), and use this disk as your new disk3. In this case, your array survived with a minor data corruption.

I am sorry, probably it is too late, because the essence of the orthodox answer in this case: "multiple failure in a raid5, here is the apocalypse!"

If you want very good, redundant raid, use software raid in linux. For example, its raid superblock data layout is public and documented... I am really sorry, for my this another heretic opinion.

Improve this answer
16
  • 8
    Shame this got down votes, it actually tries to help the OP fix the mess unlike some of the others. +1
    – Vality
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 14:54
  • 3
    @Vality it doesn't try to solve the mess, it extends his problems. A raid5 with corrupted blocks burnt in gives no end of pain as it will pass integrity checks but regularly degrade. Also he would have no idea which data is corrupt. If it was as easy as fixing a block that would be the standard solution.
    – JamesRyan
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 16:25
  • 4
    @JamesRyan I agree that it will cause some later problems and I even agree that there are underlying issues here. However it does offer a valid solution on how to get some functionality back and as the OP was talking about data recovery experts I can only assume they do not have backups to get their data back otherwise. In the end, this solution would only be part one of a fix, once this method had got the system booted again, you would probably want to transfer the filesystem to 5 new disks and then importantly back it up.
    – Vality
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 16:57
  • 1
    "You could easily make a sector-level copy of a block copy tool" Is this really what you meant to write?
    – Arnaud Meuret
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 17:43
  • 1
    @MikeFurlender I think hardware is faster, but proprietary and therefore brittle as you need to get the exact same controller in case it fails. Software RAID is independent of the hardware. See btrfs and zfs.
    – Martin Ueding
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 14:02
39

You have a double disk failure. This means your data is gone, and you will have to restore from a backup. This is why we aren't supposed to use raid 5 on large disks. You want to set up your raid so you always have the ability to withstand two disk failures, especially with large slow disks.

Improve this answer
15
  • 3
    There's two problems with RAID5. One: rebuild time of 3TB, given a slow SATA drive can be large, making odds of a compound failure high. The other is the unrecoverable bit error rate - spec sheet on most SATA drives has 1 / 10 ^ 14, which is - approx - 12TB of data. With a 5 way, 3B RAID this becomes almost inevitable when a rebuild is needed.
    – Sobrique
    Commented Jul 22, 2014 at 15:00
  • 1
    I use RAID5 on my 3TB 5 drive array, I was toying with getting a second array to use as a replicated copy of the first. That way for me to lose the data would require more than 1 disk to fail on both arrays at the same time (so I would need 4 disks) but still keeping that large amount fo the capacity available. Having read this I may now step up that time frame for getting the second array.
    – War
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 11:04
  • 1
    He has probably only a badblock on his disk3. I am really wondering why a professional sysadmin never heard from block-level copy tools.
    – peterh
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 13:31
  • 1
    @Wardy, wouldn't raid 6 give you that?
    – Basil
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 13:57
  • 3
    Not a very helpful answer. Sure, with a double disk failure on a RAID 5, chance of recovery is not good. But most double disk failures on RAID 5 are probably just a matter of one faulty disk and a few uncorrected read errors on other disks. If that's the case, recovering most of the data is still possible given the right tools. Pointers to such tools would be helpful.
    – kasperd
    Commented Aug 11, 2014 at 12:19
37

Your options are:

  1. Restoring from backups.
    • You do have backups, don't you? RAID is not a backup.

  2. Professional data recovery
    • It's possible, though very expensive and not guaranteed, that a professional recovery service will be able to recover your data.

  3. Accepting your data loss and learning from the experience.
    • As noted in the comments, large SATA disks are not recommended for a RAID 5 configuration because of the chance of a double failure during rebuild causing the array to fail.
      • If it must be parity RAID, RAID 6 is better, and next time use a hot spare as well.
      • SAS disks are better for a variety of reasons, including more reliability, resilience, and lower rates of unrecoverable bit errors that can cause UREs (unrecoverable read errors)
    • As noted above, RAID is not a backup. If the data matters, make sure it's backed up, and that your backups are restore-tested.
Improve this answer
3
  • 1
    If you have 5 disks (as per the OP), and are committed to a hot spare, surely you would take RAID10 over RAID6...?
    – jimbobmcgee
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 10:41
  • 1
    Well, for starters - you'd be using 4 spindles in a RAID 1+0 to get 2 disks worth of space, leaving one disk 'spare'. You can tolerate two failures (the right two at least). RAID6 would give you 3 disks worth of space, and can tolerate two failures as well (any two). RAID1+0 does have a better performance capability, with a lower write penalty, and potentially better random read performance (reads could be serviced from either of two spindles).
    – Sobrique
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 9:30
  • For point 2. Data Recovery. Recovering Data from a RAID5 professionally can run you $20k easy. Moreover, OP let the rebuild run overnight, stressing the disk, which can cause recovery to be more difficult or even impossible. Just letting you know ahead of time. Be sure to send all disks.
    – OmnipotentEntity
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 12:52
4

Simultaneous failure is possible, even probable, for the reasons others have given. The other possibility is that one of the disks had failed some time earlier, and you weren't actively checking it.

Make sure your monitoring would pick up a RAID volume running in degraded mode promptly. Maybe you didn't get an option but it's never good to have to learn these things from the BIOS.

Improve this answer
1
  • 3
    +1 for mentioning neglected monitoring. It is important to notice already the step "normal" -> "critical", not the step "critical" -> "failded". This applies likewise to all other types of redundancies (backup internet line, beer in the basement, spare tyre, ...).
    – Hagen von Eitzen
    Commented Jul 23, 2014 at 11:57
2

To answer "How could two hard drives fail simultaneously like that?" precisely, I'd like to quote from this article:

The crux of the argument is this. As disk drives have become larger and larger (approximately doubling in two years), the URE (unrecoverable read error) has not improved at the same rate. URE measures the frequency of occurrence of an Unrecoverable Read Error and is typically measured in errors per bits read. For example an URE rate of 1E-14 (10 ^ -14) implies that statistically, an unrecoverable read error would occur once in every 1E14 bits read (1E14 bits = 1.25E13 bytes or approximately 12TB).

...

The argument is that as disk capacities grow, and URE rate does not improve at the same rate, the possibility of a RAID5 rebuild failure increases over time. Statistically he shows that in 2009, disk capacities would have grown enough to make it meaningless to use RAID5 for any meaningful array.

So, RAID5 was unsafe in 2009. RAID6 will be soon too. As for RAID1, I started making them out of 3 disks. RAID10 with 4 disks is also precarious.

Improve this answer
8
  • 3
    Again, RAID is not a backup alternative it's purely about adding "a buffer zone" during which a disk can be replaced in order to keep available data ... available. The other option is to use replication which would require 2 arrays to fail at the same time ... much less likely I would think.
    – War
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 13:46
  • Personally, I don't like the mantra that RAID is not a backup. The dictionary says: "a person, plan, device, etc., kept in reserve to serve as a substitute, if needed." If the amount of redundancy is not enough, it will fail to serve as a substitute. If you don't care about the redundancy RAID provides, you might as well not use it. As for it not being a replacement for off-disk and off-site backups, that's a whole other matter, with which I agree (of course).
    – Halfgaar
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 14:12
  • so what is your thought on those using RAID stripes with no redundancy? in this case the RAID array is being used purely to gain a performance benefit which is a perfectly valid use IMO to my mind RAID serves 2 purposes 1. to provide speed by grouping the drives or 2. to provide a safety net in the event that n drives fail ensuring the data is still available.
    – War
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 14:36
  • Anyone implementing RAID would choose the RAID type they want to use based on their needs, speed, reliability or a combination of the 2 but that still doesn't make RAID any form of backup solution.
    – War
    Commented Jul 24, 2014 at 14:37
  • 1
    When people say RAID is not a back up, they're not talking about availability. I think you're just playing with words. :)
    – gparent
    Commented Jul 25, 2014 at 14:13
2

Thread is old but if you are reading , understand when a drive fails in a raid array, check the age of the drives. If you have several disks in a raid array and they are over 4-5 years old, the chances are good that another drive will fail. *** MAKE An IMAGE or Backup ** before you proceed. If you think you have a backup, test it to make sure you can read it and restore from it.

Reason being is that you are placing years of normal wear and tear on the remaining drives as they spin full speed for hours and hours. The larger the number of 6 year old drives, the larger chance another drive will fail from the stress. If it's RAID5, and you blow the array, great you have a backup but a 2TB disk will take 8 - 36 hours to restore depending on the type of raid controller and other hardware.

We routinely replace the entire raid hive on production servers if all the drives are old. Why wast time replacing one drive, then wait until the next one fails in a day, week, month or two. As cheep as drives are, its just not worth the down time.

Improve this answer
1

Typically when purchasing drives in a lot from a reputable reseller you can request that the drives come from different batches, which is important for reasons stated above. Next, this is precisely why RAID 1+0 exists. If you had used 6 drives in RAID 1+0 you would have had 9TB of data with immediate redundancy where no rebuilding of a volume is necessary.

Improve this answer
2
  • Where is the evidence showing that the part about using drives from different batches is anything but an urban myth? Also, RAID 1 does not magically protect against running into unreadable sectors during rebuilding. If you want protection against that you either go with RAID 6 or with RAID 1 with 3 mirrors (a tad expensive).
    – kasperd
    Commented Mar 26, 2015 at 10:39
  • 1
    @kasperd I think the question that forms the first part of your comment is similar to, though obviously not exactly the same as, Should I 'run in' one disk of a new RAID 1 pair to decrease the chance of a similar failure time?.
    – user
    Commented Mar 26, 2015 at 10:58
1

If your controller is recognized by dmraid (for instance here) on linux, you may be able to use ddrescue to recover the failed disk to a new one, and use dmraid to build the array, instead of your hardware controller.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .