I have a FreeBSD server running a RAID 5 array using the 3ware hardware controller 3DM2 (user guide PDF).
It uses 3 hot-swap drives + 1 spare.
The last couple of months one of the drives have experienced bad sectors, so I get a lot of alert e-mails like this:
20101105201229 - Controller 0
WARNING - Sector repair completed: port=2, LBA=0xBAB4594
Yesterday I then started also getting these:
20101107192948 - Controller 0
ERROR - Drive timeout detected: port=2
And:
20101108000011 - Controller 0
WARNING - SMART threshold exceeded: port=2
I can of cause wait for the drive on port 2 to fail completely - or I could just manually take it offline and let the spare kick in.
Which is the best/safest option?
Thanks :)
/thomas