I'm about to move back to hardware RAID after using Windows Spaces / Storage Pools in Windows Server 2012 R2 for a few years now. Mainly because I don't have enough ports and I need more storage so I will be splitting up my RAID and adding new drivers and ended up with ordering a LSI MegaRaid 9265-8i + Intel SAS Expander.
Therefore I backuped all data and decided to download HDD Sentinel Pro 4.71 just to inspect my hard drives as they've been running 24/7 for years now and this is the perfect time to replace drives if some is bad.
Windows Server 2012 R2 does report health status on hard drives that are a part of a Storage Pool and they are all reported as being Perfect / Healthy. So I didn't expect anything funky when installing HDD Sentinel but I was wrong.
According to HDD Sentinel, two of my WD RE 2TB hard drives are at a critical low health status of 4% due to bad sectors. I did a surface scan and they both have a few bad and damage sectors, but the number was rather low and one of the drives had most of the bad ones in a small area of the spectrum whereas the other had some issues all over.
I have filled my RAID to 98% so both drives should have been pretty much jammed-packed and I haven't had any performance or stability issues and as I mentioned above, Windows Server itself doesn't not seem to care much and reports both as healthy.
Should I be worried? I do notice that HDD Sentinel claims that doing a complete WRITE+READ or Re-Initialize disk surface might improve on the situation and restore the drives to a better health. I might give that a go before I configure things on the new hardware RAID and I might also go with RAID6 instead of RAID5 on this particular RAID so if both drives dies anytime soon I will have time to replace them without loosing anything.
What do you guys think?
Therefore I backuped all data and decided to download HDD Sentinel Pro 4.71 just to inspect my hard drives as they've been running 24/7 for years now and this is the perfect time to replace drives if some is bad.
Windows Server 2012 R2 does report health status on hard drives that are a part of a Storage Pool and they are all reported as being Perfect / Healthy. So I didn't expect anything funky when installing HDD Sentinel but I was wrong.
According to HDD Sentinel, two of my WD RE 2TB hard drives are at a critical low health status of 4% due to bad sectors. I did a surface scan and they both have a few bad and damage sectors, but the number was rather low and one of the drives had most of the bad ones in a small area of the spectrum whereas the other had some issues all over.
I have filled my RAID to 98% so both drives should have been pretty much jammed-packed and I haven't had any performance or stability issues and as I mentioned above, Windows Server itself doesn't not seem to care much and reports both as healthy.
Should I be worried? I do notice that HDD Sentinel claims that doing a complete WRITE+READ or Re-Initialize disk surface might improve on the situation and restore the drives to a better health. I might give that a go before I configure things on the new hardware RAID and I might also go with RAID6 instead of RAID5 on this particular RAID so if both drives dies anytime soon I will have time to replace them without loosing anything.
What do you guys think?