topic Exercise Disk Array not recommended?? in Disk Enclosures

Exercise Disk Array not recommended??

kenny chia — Mon, 14 Jul 2003 00:55:31 GMT

Hi
I heard that it is not recommend to do an exercise on a HP server disk array. Any advise on this?

Thanks

Re: Exercise Disk Array not recommended??

Michael Tully — Mon, 14 Jul 2003 01:06:11 GMT

If you are receiving EMS related error messages or other SCSI related messages, then maybe you should. If you don't have any problems then there is no need.

What do you deem as 'exercise'?

doing a:

# dd if=/dev/rdsk/cxtydx of=/dev/null bs=1024k

will exercise the disk in a read input and no output. This will cause a small performance overhead on the disk for the duration of the test (and SCSI controller if your using SCSI) but will not damage your system.

Re: Exercise Disk Array not recommended??

Eugeny Brychkov — Mon, 14 Jul 2003 09:39:40 GMT

I guess you mean exercise option in the STM?
No. You know usually disk arrays are intelligent devices, and they have their own tools to run and logs to check. Exercise is useless in most of the cases. The commands should be used to check disk array's connectivity are ioscan (if it's seen and claimed) and dd (to check readability writeability)
Eugeny

Re: Exercise Disk Array not recommended??

Jon Mattatall — Mon, 14 Jul 2003 10:33:00 GMT

Are you referring to the "Backend Exerciser" available in Grid Manager Field Engineer mode on things like Nike 10's and 20's?

I'm not sure of the particulars, but I have been told that the use of this option can SEVERELY damage the array. The option dates from when the product was owned by a company called Data General (or so I'm told).