Safely testing RAID setup

fwor

Just got round to doing my first real RAID 1 setup on a Shuttle SN27P2 under Linux, and pleasantly surprised at how easy it all seemed to be, as preparatory web searches suggested I would hit trouble.

But now of course I want to test that it actually works. Is there a safe (or perhaps least unsafe) way to do it? The obvious way would be to yank out either the SATA cable or the power lead on one of the drives while it's running, but could that damage one of my shiny new Samsung F3's or the motherboard?

I know I could power it down, unplug a drive and power it up again, but that's not exactly a real-world test...

I should add that I don't really care if it fails to recover and trashes my Linux install - I just want to minimise the risk of hardware damage. So... power or data (or don't do either)?

HonestDave

If you have to test it this way then data would be your best bet as you dont shock a drive suddenly spinning at 7200rpm by cutting power to the motor.

Neither is really advisable unless it is a true hot swap disk.

The way i tested my array was to fail a disk ( there was an option on my nas to do this) power down removed "failed" disk replace with one of the same size boot up and rebuild array if this works without trashing data you know your safe.

fwor

Thanks - I had the same feeling about removing the power. In theory the heads should lift off the platters as soon as power is cut, but the consequences would be bad if that didn't happen.

I don't get any options to fail a drive in the RAID setup, so I guess it's got to be done the hard way...