Areca disk order and reconstituting a failed array?

[jac]

I used to utilize a hot spare and after some past disk failures my Areca disk order is not easy for me to sort which disk is on which port.

I have two raid5 raidsets. Raid Set #00 (5 spindles) and Raid Set #01 (6 spindles).

Raid Set #01 had a mechanical failure (buzzing noise) logged as Slot10 and before I could get it swapped, a second drive Slot03 was tossed out of the array marking Raid Set #01 failed. While the system was powered on, I followed the cables and pulled the disk I believed to be Slot10 and was right. I then pulled the disk I believed to be Slot03 but Areca believes it is Slot07. Raid Set #00 went into degraded state so I re-inserted that disk waited for Raid Set #00 to rebuild to 100%.

I'm not confident the second drive (Slot03) is defective but to be safe, I powered down the system and disconnected all drives of Raid Set #01.

My questions are,

How do you accurately identify the disks when hot swap mode re-orders them?

Assuming the second disk (Slot03) is readable, can I use dd to clone each disk then plug the cloned disks into another Areca system and bring that array online to a degraded state, then insert a disk (Slot10) and rebuild the array to 100% ?

 

[nitrobass24]

Well sounds like you dont have your cables plugged in in order. That would be the first thing to sort out. If you pulled 3 and it said 7, something with your counting and/or wiring job is off.

Secondly Stop using a HotSpare. I have a cold spare on site, that I can pop in if a real drive failure occurs, otherwise I dont want my controller doing any decision making for me.

 

[jac]

Ok, on closer inspection, my cables are plugged in different than I thought I had them. I'll fix that momentarily.

I did stop using online hot spares a while ago because of the disks auto-rebuilding on their own if you had a cable not fully seated on power up.

I guess that just leaves my question if member disks can be cloned individually and worked with in another system?

 

[nitrobass24]

Yes you can do that....I cannot vouch for DD, but have used R-Studio to do a recovery where I cloned each drive and worked with the clones to reconstruct my RAID6 array.