dealing with a failing drive

[Ted Mittelstaedt]

The output of idacontrol show will show if one of the
hard disks in the SmartArray has failed.  Your choice with
a hardware array is to either run it with redundancy or not.
(ie: raid5 or mirroring or striping)  You have to choose 
which is more important for you.

IMHO it is very foolish to stripe an array that you have
critical data on and assume that you can predict a failure
of a disk using smart or other monitoring, and replace it
in advance of a failure.  If your concern is redundancy, then
add more disks to the array and create a raid 5 or a mirror.
Then ignore all the predictive junk and let the array card
concern itself with detecting if a drive has failed.  Run
idacontrol periodically out of a script that checks for a
failure of a disk and e-mails you if there is one.

Ted

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of David Newman
> Sent: Monday, November 19, 2007 8:44 AM
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: dealing with a failing drive
> 
> 
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
> 
> On 11/18/07 11:30 PM, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
> > Hi David,  apologies to Jerry for jumping in.
> > 
> > Compaq uses several RAID cards most are under the so-called
> > "SmartArray" using the ida driver.  If this is yours, you can
> > use a utility called "idacontrol" that can monitor the array,
> 
> Hi Ted,
> 
> Thanks much for this info. I'm pleased to report that idacontrol thinks
> the logical array is in good shape. (This is on an identical server; I
> moved both disks from a RAID1 array there after the first server started
> reporting write and read errors.)
> 
> 
> > NOTE:
> > 
> > The smart utility only works on SATA or ATA/IDE drives, not SCSI.
> 
> Yes. I've heard it said that "SMART isn't."
> 
> This Proliant DL320 server uses a SmartArray controller and SCSI disks.
> SMART or not, is there a way of monitoring the health of the physical
> disks from within FreeBSD?
> 
> thanks again!
> 
> dn
> 
> 
> 
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