question about RAID 1 rebuilding

[Barnaby]

Ok, I haven't gotten to the point of needing a rebuild, but I'm curious as to how the process works. I've read through the documentation for nvraid (i have a K8N Neo2), and the rebuild process seems pretty straightforward, but all the examples it gives are about putting in a 3rd drive, and telling it to rebuild that way..

What happens if you're out of free SATA ports? Is it possible to just pull the bad drive in the array, and replace it with a new one? If so, what's the process? do I need to do anything in the raid bios? or just go into the nvraid manager and tell it to rebuild?

Has anyone actually done this, so I don't get conjecture..

 

[ambit]

The 3Ware IDE's and the AMI/Adaptec/LSI SCSI cards that i've dealt with will all rebuild the array without any intervention from you once a new drive is inserted.
Well, not exactly. You may need to specify to the controller to rescan the bus and detect the new drive, then tell the managment software that it is available as a hot spare. But that's only on the 3Ware cards.
The scsi cards tend to do it on their own once they've spun up and found the new working drive.
The LSI CIMStatus, the Compaq SmartArray and the Dell OpenManage util's that i've used for array management will all show some kind of progress during the rebuild.

[edit]
If you're out of ports, i would bring the machine down, replace the dead drive and boot up. Go into the controllers BIOS or into the Windows App and let it know the new drive is available for the array