Hardware RAID diagnostics (Dell PERC 6/i)

[Jesse Sheidlower]

I'm in the process of getting a new server, and have been
planning on a Dell PowerEdge 1950.

I see from this thread:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2008-January/039675.html

That the PERC 6/i RAID controller seems to work fine with the
mfi(4) driver; I was planning on a 4 x 73GB RAID5 setup, so
the problems about addressing > 1TB don't seem to apply.

My straightforward question is just wondering about how you
get diagnostics from this device. My server will be in a
remote location, so I'm curious how I would even know if a
disk has failed. There wasn't anything about this in the
mfi(4) manpage, nor in the RAID section of the Handbook.

My current server is in a 2 x 18GB RAID1 setup, but I pretty
much plugged it in and it Just Worked, and I never thought
about it any more; this time I'd like to know more about how
to manage it.

Thanks.

Jesse Sheidlower