Guy Adams on Technology

For a fair while now I have wanted to upgrade the disk subsystem on our main server. It was running a RAID 1 (mirrored) setup and for extra performance but still with redundancy I thought four new hard drives and RAID 5 would be perfect.

So this weekend arrived and electrical work at our head office meant the power would be off for most of the weekend, perfect timing for the upgrade.

I packed the server up, took it home and began the process.

I spent the first three hours trying to work out why the server wouldn’t detect a hard drive that I had planned to copy the data to, three long hours of adjusting the bios and testing the drive in another machine, fiddling with drive assignment, etc.

The problem…..

The IDE cable I was using to connect. No signs of physical damage but it just didn’t work.

I swapped the cable out and all worked fine, copied the data using the fantastic Partition Manager Server 8.5, around 100GB copied in three hours.

So it just goes to show how easy it is to forgot the simple troubleshooting and jump in at the deep end with the complex stuff. I could of got three hours of my precious weekend back! Orwell we live and learn.

Tags: RAID