Maintenance and Last Erred States

When a component in a RAID-1 or RAID-5 volume experiences errors, Solaris Volume Manager puts the component in the “Maintenance” state. No further reads or writes are performed to a component in the “Maintenance” state.

Sometimes a component goes into a “Last Erred” state. For a RAID-1 volume, this usually occurs with a one-sided mirror. The volume experiences errors. However, there are no redundant components to read from. For a RAID-5 volume this occurs after one component goes into “Maintenance” state, and another component fails. The second component to fail goes into the “Last Erred” state.

When either a RAID-1 volume or a RAID-5 volume has a component in the “Last Erred” state, I/O is still attempted to the component marked “Last Erred.” This I/O attempt occurs because a “Last Erred” component contains the last good copy of data from Solaris Volume Manager's point of view. With a component in the “Last Erred” state, the volume behaves like a normal device (disk) and returns I/O errors to an application. Usually, at this point, some data has been lost.

The subsequent errors on other components in the same volume are handled differently, depending on the type of volume.

RAID-1 Volume

A RAID-1 volume might be able to tolerate many components in the “Maintenance” state and still be read from and written to. If components are in the “Maintenance” state, no data has been lost. You can safely replace or enable the components in any order. If a component is in the “Last Erred” state, you cannot replace it until you first replace the components in the “Maintenance” state. Replacing or enabling a component in the “Last Erred” state usually means that some data has been lost. Be sure to validate the data on the mirror after you repair it.

RAID-5 Volume

A RAID-5 volume can tolerate a single component in the “Maintenance” state. You can safely replace a single component in the “Maintenance” state without losing data. If an error on another component occurs, it is put into the “Last Erred” state. At this point, the RAID-5 volume is a read-only device. You need to perform some type of error recovery so that the state of the RAID-5 volume is stable and the possibility of data loss is reduced. If a RAID-5 volume reaches a “Last Erred” state, there is a good chance it has lost data. Be sure to validate the data on the RAID-5 volume after you repair it.

Always replace components in the “Maintenance” state first, followed by those in the “Last Erred” state. After a component is replaced and resynchronized, use the metastat command to verify its state. Then, validate the data.