So, to start with, let me confess I have no knowledge of RAID besides what I read in a few APC mags 5 years back and what the acronym stands for. Everything I know now comes from assumptions and the past day's research. We have a LSI MegaRaid array in our companies DCSERVER. It predates me at the company and I had no hand in it's setup. It consists of 2 drive groups - 2 280 Gb SAS drives make up a 280 Gb virtual drive, and another set of 4 1Tb drives makes up what was (I believe) an almost 4 Tb virtual drive. Based on this (and no other information, because I couldn't find where to look for it) I think we use only striping, no mirroring on the second group, whereas the first is just a mirrored drive for redundancy.
So that's the situation. A little while ago one of the drives in the second group died. Right now it shows as a 0 Bytes Unconfigured bad drive. The virtual drive it is in shows as degraded but still works for now. The physical drive itself (and the other three in the same group) are all the same drive (Seagate ST31000640SS fwiw) but this drive is now EOL and we can't get one from our supplier. I have read that I need to know how many sectors are in the disc when formatted, so I can replace it with one that has more, or at least no less. Most of the info I have thusfar I got from MegaRAID's Storage Manager, but sectors in a disk doesn't appear to be listed anywhere. Does anyone know the best place to go looking for this?
I know fsutil will give that to me for the virtual drive, will this correlate exactly or functionally to the number in one physical drive? I would also be incredibly grateful for any answer that does not require me turning off/restarting the server or removing the disk.
