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I have read in a couple of places that when you are in the situation in which there are no spare disks and the RAID level doesn't protect you from another disk failure, some administrators choose to turn off storage until the new storage drives arrives.

However, I came across various vendors that advice against turning off storage unless you are replacing a a controller in a single controller system.

So, when the data is at serious risk if one more drive fails, why would be a bad idea to turn off the storage?

Thanks in advance!

Gabriel Talavera
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    References please ... – user9517 Jul 05 '13 at 21:58
  • http://serverfault.com/questions/306526/raid-6-better-to-replace-two-dead-drives-at-the-same-time-or-one-at-a-time – Gabriel Talavera Jul 05 '13 at 22:22
  • (Look at the comments of that post, That was an example of somebody turning off the storage/server and somebody else stating that it was a bad idea) – Gabriel Talavera Jul 05 '13 at 22:23
  • That's a slightly different scenario from what you present in your question - your linked question describes an array with the maximum number of failed drives that the RAID level can tolerare *AND* one of the remaining array drives is giving SMART errors (i.e. presenting a risk of imminent total array failure). In your scenario, you don't mention anything about the remaining drives having problems. – Chris McKeown Jul 05 '13 at 22:29
  • Just to expand on the above, if I had an array which had suffered a failure of redundancy, I wouldn't choose to turn it off but on the flip side it wouldn't worry me too much if I had to for some reason. On the other hand if I had an array with no redundancy and one of the remaining drives was looking flaky, there's no way I'd considere powering it off in case it didn't come back up. – Chris McKeown Jul 05 '13 at 22:39
  • It's usually *highly* advised to have a cold spare sitting close by in case that happens. This way you don't have to hope another drive doesn't fail until the new drive comes in. – Nathan C Jul 06 '13 at 03:03

2 Answers2

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Start up / shutdown is harder on the disks than continuous operation.

Daniel Widrick
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  • Agreed. If I had an array that had suffered a disk failure and there was no hot spare for the rebuild, given a choice between powering the array off or leaving it alone, I would choose the latter. – Chris McKeown Jul 05 '13 at 22:24
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Because your data is at risk with a sudden power loss as well. If you do a CLEAN/ordered shut down, I don't see what the issue would be.