RAID Introduction - Practice part

A common real-life situation is when a client brings in a disk set, but not the device the disks were originally in. Routine process is then to identify the controlling device, be it a NAS or a RAID controller, and figure as much as possible from the device documentation. This is done simply by using Google.

With any type of device you can get at least:

• maximum possible number of disks connected,
• list of supported RAID levels,
• hotspare capability when applicable.

With a NAS, you can additionally get at least:

• software RAID layout in use,
• list of possible filesystem types.

Plus, whatever additional information might be available is also great.

The identification is typically done by a photo or by having customer read everything printed on the device over the phone.

The following two tasks do not require anything special and take maybe ten minutes each.

Task 1 - Identify device by photo

Identify and collect as much as possible information about this device (click image for full size).

Task 2 - Identify device by partial label

Identify and collect as much as possible information about a "black box" which has the following two labels on it:
"LS-WXL series", "LS-WXZ.OTL".

What we did in these situations

For a reference point, see what we did and what we were able to figure out - download PDF with our notes here.