topic Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity in MSA Storage

MSA1000 / Disk Activity

CA1138262 — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 09:51:16 GMT

Hi,

Just bought ourselves a nice MSA1000 with HA option. We've assembled all the bits into what we think are the right places, etc.

Got it in a test environment with a W2K server
with 2 HBAs and SecurePath s/w installed.
Configured a RAID-AVG physical volume and
2 logical arrays with selective presentation.

We've noticed that the disk activity leds
seem to be flashing quite a bit of the time.
The W2K server has one of the arrays mounted
as an NTFS voulme but there are no files on it.

Question : Is this expected behaviour ?

Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity

Uwe Zessin — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 11:43:50 GMT

Jeff,
that behaviour is absolutely normal, because the MSA1000 does delayed logical disk initialization and disk scrubbing (testing disks).

Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity

CA1138262 — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 12:01:40 GMT

Hi Uwe,

Thanks for the reply.

We set this thing up c.a. 1 week ago
(and then got dragged off to sort other things).

The weird thing is, it's still exhibiting this behaviour, disk leds flickering away.

So it can't be array initialisation, etc.

It must be some sort of disk access/testing by the controllers, SecurePath s/w or W2K server.

Is that so ?

Many Thanks,

Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity

Uwe Zessin — Wed, 02 Jun 2004 23:55:40 GMT

Hello, Jeff.
Yes, that is correct. The array is testing the disks. If you pull a report with the Array Diagnostic Utility (ADU) and you look deep into the report you can even find a counter how often this has run already.

Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity

CA1090196 — Wed, 18 Aug 2004 23:21:05 GMT

I Also have same case on MSA1K that disk activity light on all the time.

But the old one MSA1K setup under Win2k cluster env. (via SCSI port) that do not have such behavior.

The new one we just brought that equiped fiber module & update to latest frimware that HDs activity quite busy.

So it make me quite confuse why the old one MSA1K do not do such job (disk cheing/testing) ?

Cody.

Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity

Uwe Zessin — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 00:53:06 GMT

It sounds like you have upgraded from a MSA500 to a MSA1000. The MSA500 uses a different controller. I don't have experience with this box - it is possible that its firmware works different.

Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity

CA1090196 — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 05:38:17 GMT

Yes you are right ! :)

Regarding "disk scrubbing(testing disks)" on
MSA1000, does it can be adjustable or not ?
I seems do not find how to ?
Meantime, such process will reduce the HD lifetime ? because it testing so quite often ??

Regards.

Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity

Uwe Zessin — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 12:07:10 GMT

Hello Cody,
I haven't seen any knob for it, but I don't work with the MSA very often and I usually use the CLI so I could have missed it.

High performance disk drives are designed for a high duty cycle. From looking at the lights it looks like the disk drives don't do much seeks - they rather do a spiral read.

Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity

CA1090196 — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 19:55:11 GMT

I see !

Thanks your advises.

Regards.

Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity

CA1193602 — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 08:02:43 GMT

I ve got the same beahvior - the disks are working the whole time. It was not an upgrade but a new MSA1000 - and i also have bad write/read performance.
The host ist installed with linux 2.6. The drivers are the ones that shipped with suse Linux 2.6 and not the original drivers because they dont support kernel 2.6

Re: MSA1000 / Disk Activity

meloni — Mon, 11 Oct 2004 16:30:31 GMT

untill the first initialization is not finished, you can get this activity. also this activity stop when there is acces form a host and restart after a delay when there is no more access.
If you have some kind of sw (like cluster services) that poll the disk to see if it is still present, this activity can be delayed and take long time to end. this will not cause any behavior, because if the system need to write in a zone not yet inizialysed, the inizialization will take place when writing data