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One of disks in our RAID 1 configuration gone bad, and caused the whole logical disk to become in bad stripes mode.

We replaced the bad disk with a new one and complete the rebuild, but the logical drive still in bad stripes mode.

Now, IBM says that bad stripes is actually a counter that going up, and the only way to reset it is to erase and re-create the RAID.

As this going to cause quite some downtime here due to huge amount of data involved, I'd like to know if it possible to keep running the RAID with bad stripes, or it's a really bad idea and RAID re-creation should be done ASAP.

Thanks for any advice!

sysadmin1138
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SyRenity
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1 Answers1

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It all boils down to whether you're willing to risk it all going horribly wrong (and if this is an error counter which only goes up, it sounds like you're asking for trouble). Personally, I think it's irresponsible to leave a production server in service that is complaining of RAID errors (but hey, that's only my opinion).

Your RAID array is already reporting errors - you have no idea if this is affecting the underlying data on the disk or not. It may just corrupt a few files that nobody has looked at for years, but it's more likely to do damage to the Operating System and cause it to do some very weird and wonderful things or just crash and Blue Screen inexplicably.

Is it possible to run with bad stripes? Sure, you seem to be running it with bad stripes at the moment.
Is it advisable to run with bad stripes? Absolutely not.

Ben Pilbrow
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