Choosing the primary physical drive of the array
When you create a RAID level-1 logical drive on an
integrated RAID controller, you must specify the
primary physical drive. Doing so ensures that you retain the data on the primary
physical drive. In a RAID level-1 logical drive, the data on the primary physical
drive is copied to the secondary physical drive (the mirror). Any data on the
secondary physical drive is destroyed.
After the logical drive is created, the physical drive Properties panel reports
the mirror role (primary or secondary) of each drive:
Knowing the mirror role of each physical drive can be useful in the following
situations:
- Creating a logical drive with a physical drive that already contains data.
A server has one physical drive and the operating system is installed on that
physical drive. You decide that you want a RAID level-1 logical drive to achieve
redundancy. When you install a second physical drive and configure the logical
drive, you must specify the original physical drive as the primary physical
drive so you do not destroy the data on that drive.
- During a synchronization failure.
After the logical drive is created, a synchronization begins to create the
mirror of the primary physical drive. While the synchronization is in progress,
the logical drive is displayed as critical, because the mirror is not complete
and the logical drive has not achieved redundancy. During the synchronization,
if the primary physical drive fails, all of the data on the drive is lost
because the mirror is incomplete. If the secondary physical drive fails, the
data on the primary physical drive is intact and you can create the mirror
using a hot-spare drive.
More information
x-0741-SRM-00-06-EN