mac pro... mirrored raid... need to replace a disk

[terzinator]

I have a mac pro running 10.5.8 server with four drives.

Two drives are mirrored as the Boot RAID, two are mirrored as the Data RAID.

One of the Data RAID disks has gone south. (it's a 750GB drive.) The only thing this houses is our mailserver. Small company, only 18GB of mail data.

I picked up a couple of 1TB WD Caviar Black drives. (Store didn't have a 750GB drive.)

So, how would you tackle this?

1) Pull out the bad drive.
2) Insert new drive.

Then I get into a bit of a gray area.

- Format with disk utility?
- Rebuild mirror using Terminal?
- Clone the good old 750GB drive to one of the brand-new 1TB drives, then start fresh with that? (And then rebuild the mirror to the other brand-new 1TB drive?)

Found some info on this CNET page:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10330310-263.html

That page says to put the new drive in, and run this:

sudo diskutil repairMirror MIRRORNODE NEWDISKNODE

(where MIRRORNODE would be the good old drive, and NEWDISKNODE would be the new drive)

But that's going to assume similar drives, right? (same size, etc...)

Any thoughts?

Here's the terminal entry when I ran checkRAID

Name:                 Data_RAID
Unique ID:            E82B5162-1480-4752-B663-2D6D6C66BD08
Type:                 Mirror
Status:               Degraded
Size:                 749812383744 B
Rebuild:              automatic
Device Node:          disk5
Apple RAID Version:   2
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
#   Device Node       UUID                                   Status
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
0   -none-            6D78A4C2-4A82-468C-BCB6-AEAED572A283   Failed
1   disk0s2           4B2018D6-A2ED-47F0-AE6E-C0C959B33506   Online

 

[wonderspark]

I'd clone the good 750 to a 1TB, then replace it with second 1TB and rebuild mirror.

 

[terzinator]

I'd clone the good 750 to a 1TB, then replace it with second 1TB and rebuild mirror.

Yep, I'm leaning that way.

Just hoping to find a step-by-step so I make sure I do everything right!

From that Terminal output, it appears that the rebuild is set to "automatic"... does that mean all I need to do is pull out the bad drive and pop in the new one?

If that's the case, does rebuilding the mirror do the same thing as cloning the old drive? Meaning, pull the bad drive out, put the new 1TB drive in, let it automatically rebuild the mirror. Then pull the working 750GB drive out, put the other new 1TB drive in, and rebuild the mirror again from the new 1TB drive?

I used to have a tech help me with this, but he's gone AWOL.