Drive light on all the time on 8-STABLE.

[Jonathan Chen]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 08:03:02PM +1100, Ian Smith wrote:
> Jonathan,
> 
> On Sun, 17 Jan 2010, Jonathan Chen wrote:
>  > On the weekend, I moved my 8-STABLE installation (csup'd late Dec 2009)
>  > onto a new drive, a Seagate ST31000528AS CC3; and while the transfer was
>  > successful, I've noticed that the drive light is solidly on all the time,
>  > even if it boots into single-user.
> 
> I guess this is the red/amber case LED, rather than on the drive itself?

Yes.

>  > # uname -a
>  > FreeBSD osiris.chen.org.nz 8.0-STABLE FreeBSD 8.0-STABLE #1: Sat Jan 16 08:32:54 NZDT 2010     root@:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/OSIRIS  amd64
>  > 
>  > Is this something I should be worried about? There doesn't appear to
>  > be any disk I/O (I can't hear the disk grinding), but I may be wrong.
> 
> gstat should be definitive about activity.  Even constant low level 
> activity should usually show some flickering.

gstat doesn't show much activity on the drive at all. Most of the time
the drive and it's associated slices read green on 0.0.

>  > The drive from which I transferred from did not exhibit this strange
>  > behaviour.
>  > 
>  > Any advice would be welcome.
> 
> If it were IDE I'd suspect its cable - and the drive if it wasn't that 
> - but I guess the SATA controller would be driving the LED.

Yup. I've booted it into Windows, and the behaviour is what I'd expect
- ie LED is off when no disk activity is happening.

Thanks anyway.
-- 
Jonathan Chen <jonc at chen.org.nz>
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity
                     -- the rest is overhead for the operating system.