Lenovo ThinkStation P360 User guide

RAID – Install, Identify, and Repair.

Lenovo ThinkStation P360 Tower

Table of Contents

Overview ............................................................................................................................ 2

Section 1 – RAID, which one to choose? ........................................................................... 3

Section 2 – How to Enable & Configure Intel® RST VMD RAID ......................................... 6

Section 3 – RAID Recovery ................................................................................................ 7

Section 4 – Performance Examples ................................................................................. 15

Section 5 – Revision History ............................................................................................ 16

Overview

This document will attempt to help the end user identify the affected storage

building block when a RAID array goes into a degraded state. This is extremely

important because if you remove one of the remaining good drives rather than the

faulty one you will most likely lose all your data.

We will cover the P360 tower in this document but many of the principles remain

the same for the ThinkStation range. We will focus on the Intel platform (Intel®

RST VMD) and a Microsoft Windows environment.

Section 1 – RAID, which one to choose?

On a workstation platform the key target use for a RAID configuration is for

performance rather than redundancy.

RAID is not a backup device!

If you suffer a double disk failure (RAID5) you will lose your data.

If you hit a bad block during rebuild, the rebuild will fail and you will lose your data

(RAID5)

If you suffer a malware attack and your drive is encrypted by ransomware you

may lose all your data. (All RAID)

If the file system becomes corrupt, even if the underlying array is fine, you may

lose all your data. (All RAID)

RAID cannot protect against Human error. (All RAID)

RAID cannot protect against fire and flood! (All RAID)

With any backup you should employ the 3-2-1 rule,

• 3: Create one primary backup and two copies of your data.

• 2: Save your backups to two different types of media.

• 1: Keep at least one backup file offsite

For any data you simply must retain this should be copied to a network share or

SAN, preferably in a secure Datacenter with an established enterprise, multi-site

backup solution.

RAID arrays in servers and datacenters have significantly more drives so the

failure rate is distributed amongst a greater number of components. They employ

distributed sparing, double, triple or even quadruple parity, plus redundancy in

power and compute components.

With the above caveats noted raided disk can offer significant benefits in a high-

end workstation. If you simply must have the fastest disk access possible in a

standalone workstation a RAID ZERO array, striping two or more drives together

is a good place to start. Three M.2 NVMe drives doing the work of one offers

significant speed advantages over just a single drive.

CAUTION: RAID Zero (RAID 0) offers NO redundancy. If you lose one drive, you

will lose all your data and you will need to rebuild the volume and restore from

backup. At the point you lose a disk all writes to the remaining disks are stopped.

If you can get the original disk back online (reseat, power cycle) you may be

lucky, and the volume can come back online and the data intact. But this is rare.

RAID 0 is based on data striping. A stream of data is divided into multiple

segments or blocks and each of those blocks is stored on different disks. So,

when the system wants to read that data, it can do so simultaneously from all the

disks by joining them together to reconstruct the entire data stream. The benefit of

this is that the speed increases dramatically for read and write operations. It is

great for situations where performance is a priority over other aspects. Also, the

total capacity of the entire volume is the sum of the capacities of the individual

disks. The downside is that there is no redundancy. If one of the disks fails, the

entire volume goes offline and cannot be accessed anymore.

Advantages:

• Performance is boosted for read and write operations.

• Space is not wasted as the entire volume of the individual disks is used to

store the data.

Disadvantages

• There is no redundancy/duplication of data. If one of the disks fails, the

entire data volume is lost.

RAID 1 uses the concept of data mirroring. Data is mirrored or cloned to an

identical disk so that if one of the disks fails, the other one is used. It also improves

read performance since different blocks of data can be accessed from both disks

simultaneously. Unlike RAID 0, write performance is reduced since both drives

must be updated whenever new data is written. Another disadvantage is that

space is wasted to duplicate the data thereby increasing the cost to storage unit

ratio.

Advantages

• Data can be recovered in case of single disk failure

• Increased performance for read operation (over a single JBOD drive)

Disadvantages

• Slower write performance over RAID 0

• Space is wasted by duplicating data which increases the cost per storage

unit.

RAID 10 combines both RAID 1 and RAID 0 by leveraging them in opposite order.

This is a “best of both worlds approach” because it has the fast performance of

RAID 0 and the redundancy of RAID 1. In this setup, mirrored blocks are striped

across at least four drives. It is used in cases where disk performance (greater

than RAID 5) along with redundancy is required.

Advantages

• Fast performance (compared to RAID 5)

• Redundancy and fault tolerance

Disadvantages

• Cost per storage unit is high since data is mirrored.

RAID 5 stripes the data across multiple disks just like RAID 0. In addition to that, it

also stores parity information distributed over all the disks to achieve redundancy.

If one of the disks fails, the data can be reconstructed using the parity information

striped across the remaining disks. Space is more efficiently used here when

compared to RAID 1 since parity information uses way less space than mirroring

the disk. The overhead of constructing and placing this parity information adds an

overhead in write performance to the previous RAID levels mentioned. You should

be aware that when the array is degraded you are vulnerable because if you hit a

bad block during the rebuild there is not enough parity data to reconstruct the

volume and the rebuild will fail. To mitigate against this the array will usually

perform periodic scrubs looking for and mapping out bad blocks. A rebuild of a raid

5 volume of multiple terabytes can take many, many hours, and the chance of

hitting a bad block increases with the capacity of the drive. For +1TB volumes

RAID 6 should be considered with dual parity capability at an increased cost to

performance and capacity.

Advantages

• Efficient data redundancy in terms of cost per storage unit

• Performance boost for read operations due to data stripping

Disadvantages

• Write operation is slow compared to RAID 0/1/10

• Can only handle up to a single disk failure

Section 2 – How to Enable & Configure Intel®

RST VMD RAID

Instructions for the configuration of RAID via the BIOS interface has already been covered

extensively in the following Lenovo document, Section 6:

Lenovo P360 Storage Configurator v1.1

For the purposes of this document, we have configured:

• Name: Volume1

• RAID Level: RAID0 (Stripe)

• Select the desired M.2 NVMe disks,

• Name: Volume2

• RAID Level: RAID5 (Parity)

• Select the desired SATA disks,

Now boot from your installation/recovery media. Ideally this should be a Lenovo USB

recovery pen drive prepared well in advance.

Lenovo Recovery

During the recovery process it is important to select the right RAID array using the RAID

type and capacity as a guide.

Note: Heed the warning all volumes will be formatted, and existing data will be lost!

Section 3 – RAID Recovery

The first time you will suspect something is wrong is usually via a message at POST when

you turn the system on,

If configured for anything other than RAID0 the system should boot normally providing you

have only lost one drive and you may notice system performance is reduced.

Within windows you should see something similar to the following alert notification,

These notifications require that you have the Intel® Optane™ Memory and Storage

Management utility installed. It should be available as part of Windows update, once

configured for RAID and as part of the Lenovo pre-load OS.

If it’s not installed or appears nonfunctional, please see the following Lenovo document

which covers how to install it.

Lenovo Raid Degradation Notification.pdf

Windows isn’t very helpful at identifying faulty RAID disks, as the physical disks that

makeup a volume are hidden away behind the controller when configured for RAID.

Furthermore, the order the drives are presented to Windows may not be as you assume.

In our example, although we set up Volume1 (RAID0) 1st and installed the running

operating system to it, it is listed as Disk 1. The second Volume2 (RAID5) is listed as Disk

No mention of RAID within disk management itself but if you right-click select the

properties of each Disk it will list its Bus number, and target ID, not the individual physical

disks.

Again, we can confirm our NVME RAID0 volume has been enumerated after the SATA

RAID5 Volume. This useful information when understanding your disk subsystem.

As you can imagine this becomes more complex when the arrays are both configured as

RAID0/5 and are of the same capacity.

The key point here is because the RAID5 volume is fault-tolerant and we have only lost

one drive the volume is still online, and Windows Disk Management is unaware of the

issue.

As soon as you see any of these alerts open up the Intel® Optane™ Memory and

Storage Management utility to try and identify what has happened.

In our example we can see an unknown hard disk (disk unavailable).

Selecting this disk doesn’t reveal very much, no controller or port number, BUT it does

remember the disk serial number, note it down! This is VERY important information for

later when it comes to confirming the right physical disk that needs replacing.

Drive (D:) in our example will remain online and operational but it is degraded. You should

not run the array degraded for very long or you may suffer data corruption which is why it

is imperative the faulty drive is changed as soon as possible. Also, backup your data if you

have not already done so. You may suffer a further drive failure and all data will be lost.

The performance of the array will also be impacted while it is degraded. It has to ‘work out’

what the missing data is on the fly!

The controller and ports of the remaining drives are still listed so through a process of

elimination one should be able to work out the port with the now missing disk attached.

This same information can be verified within the BIOS of the workstation by navigating to

Devices -> ATA Drive Setup -> Intel® Rapid Storage Technology,

However, it is not possible to view the serial number of the missing disk from within the

BIOS. All the active disks are obviously still listed.

NOTE: The SATA ports are enumerated within Windows as they are within the BIOS, Controller2

ports 4 to 7 but the NVME drives are listed as Controller 3, 4 & 5 port0 under Windows but listed as

ports 1 to 3 within the BIOS. Therefore, it is imperative, care is taken when identifying the correct

drive for replacement.

Please refer to the following image and table as a guide for the P360 tower.

BIOS version: S0EKT2DA

Motherboard

BIOS

Windows

Example Serial Numbers

Disk 1

NVME (m2_ssd_1)

PCIe P1

Cnt3 P0

214433E915AD

Disk 2

NVME (m2_ssd_2)

PCIe P2

Cnt5 P0

214434A995D7

Disk 3

NVME (PCIe add-in)

PCIe P3

Cnt4 P0

214434A996E9

Disk 4

SATA (sata1)

SATA P4

Cnt2 P4

154010B78111

Disk 5

SATA (sata2)

SATA P5

Cnt2 P5

WFL5DE2V

Disk 6

SATA (sata3)

SATA P6

Cnt2 P6

153910AC905F

Disk 7

SATA (sata4)

SATA P7

Cnt2 P7

153910AC9A20

Note: Example with current drive configuration.

As you can see when you have many disks it can be very confusing to identify the faulty

disk drive. With the information above you should be able to work out which drive is most

likely the faulty one. Armed with this information SHUTDOWN the workstation and remove

the power and then the side panel.

Refer to the hardware maintenance manual for information on the drive removal process.

Lenovo P360 Hardware Maintenance Manual

The serial number will usually be on a sticker with many other numbers, attached to the

drive but should be easily identifiable. When you think you have identified the faulty drive

confirm by crosschecking the drive serial number with the one noted down earlier.

Install a replacement drive of the same or greater capacity. Replace the side cover and

reattach the power cable. Power on the workstation!

Once Windows boots open the Intel® Optane™ Memory and Storage Management utility

again and select the newly installed drive, Then Mark as spare.

WARNING: Make sure you select the right drive as all data will be overwritten.

Confirm with the SN of the new drive. Non-Raided JBOD disk will also appear in this list.

At this point the drive should start the rebuild process.

This can also be achieved in the BIOS menu if you are not using Windows as your

operating system or you do not have the utility installed.

Navigate to Devices -> ATA Drive Setup -> Intel® Rapid Storage Technology,

Select the degraded array,

Rebuild,

Then select the newly installed drive,

WARNING: Make sure you select the right drive as all data will be overwritten.

Confirm with the SN of the new drive. Non-Raided JBOD disk will also appear in this list.

The volume status should now be listed as rebuilding.

Section 4 – Performance Examples

To help illustrate the performance benefits of RAID0 compared to the redundancy of

RAID5 the following examples were captured using the 3 x NVME dives mentioned in this

document, as the Windows boot drive, on a P360 Tower with Passmark benchmarking

software.

Version:10.2 Disk Mark

https://www.passmark.com/products/performancetest/

RAID 0: 3 x NVME~1.3TB

RAID 1: 2 x NVME ~477GB

RAID 5: 3 x NVME~951GB

JBOD: 1 x NVME ~477GB

Section 5 – Revision History

Version

Date

Author

Changes/Updates

0.1

05/09/2022

Matthew Ridsdale

Draft

0.2

06/10/2022

Matthew Ridsdale

Revision following feedback (JM)

1.0

03/11/2022

Matthew Ridsdale

Release following feedback (JP)

Lenovo ThinkStation P360 User guide

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