I have 6 1tb drives in a RAID5. 1 drive went down. On the RAID was 2 virtual machines that I really need back up and running. The spare drive I have to put in the server is a 1.5tb drive, which exceeds the physical per drive limit of the 2020SA. The drive is found in the disk utility, but it is not found in the array management section. I cannot add the drive to the array to have it rebuild.
I have a replacement drive along with some spares on their way from Newegg, but I am still looking at a few days of downtime. Is it possible to use the 5 working drives to get the VMs copied off and on to another server or do I just have to wait for the drives to get here?
The whole point of a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks is that there is redundancy built in, at some level. A raid 5 array should have survived a single disk loss. That card does support ot swap so the failure should have been invisible as far as IO is concerned. The max Array size (I think ) is only 2 TB so I wonder if your issue is compounded by creating an array too large?
Did the server actually go down? if so then the array's not doing what it should, i.e. allow you to survive a single disk failure, if it stayed up then you may as well copy the VMs off now, in fact I'd recommend it.
By the way, RAID 5 arrays of large disks, especially SATA ones is a terrible idea, search around on this site to spot the tails of woe from others in this situation.