A few weeks ago I had the distinct displeasure of waking up to a series of emails indicating that a series of RAID arrays on a remote system had degraded. The remote system was still running, but one of the hard drives was pretty much dead.

Upon logging in, it was found that four out of six RAID devices for a particular drive match were running in degraded mode: four partitions of the /dev/sdf device had failed; the two operational partitions still working were the /boot and swap partitions (the system is running three RAID1 mirrored drives; a total of six physical drives).

Checking the SMART status of /dev/sdf showed that SMART information on the drive could not be read. It was absolutely on its last legs. Luckily, I had a spare 300GB drive with which to replace it, so the removal and restructure of the RAID devices would be easy.

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