Disk Failures?

[Brendan Oldham]

Hi there:

I am curious if others have encountered disk failures on Nimble SANs. We've encountered 2 over the last month or so. I should mention that Nimble support was very responsive in getting us replacement drives and resolving the issue.

Historically, we used Equallogic SANs. Over 5 years, we never had a SAS drive failure, but hat lots (a dozen or so) of disk failures our our SATA SAN. In fact, Equallogic (Dell) sent us a complete set of disks to swap out.

Are SAS drives considered more reliable than SATA? If so, I'd love to see a SAS Nimble and I bet many of us would we willing to spend a bit more $$$ for the peace of mind.

[bleblanc15 · Accepted solution]

Brendan,

This is unfortunate and I can tell you that it's anomalous, for sure. Generally, the CASL layout is very kind to the spindles by drastically minimizing the usual thrashing of a random workload. Would it be OK for me to open a case for you regarding this issue? I would like support and the platform team to analyze the workload as well as the environmental stats on the drives.

Thanks,

Bryce

[Brendan Oldham]

Hi Bryce:

That would be great. Thanks!

[bleblanc15]

Consider it done, Brendan!

[daniel_kwong]

I've had a CS220 running in production for almost 2.5 years on a VDI workload before I saw my first disk failure.  You are correct in that Nimble is very responsive in the replacement.  A week later, another disk was indicating a predictive failure, but not having any problem, and Nimble sent me a replacement.  Everything is working great for me now 6 months later.

[bleblanc15]

Daniel,

Thank you, for your feedback! That is what I'm used to seeing in the field. Well, except for 2 in 2 weeks. that's just unlucky...

Thanks,

Bryce

[eysfilm136]

We have a CS220 in production for almost 2 years and have not had any failures (knock on wood).  Must have just been a complete fluke that this happened to you.

Typically SAS drives are more reliable then SATA but you pay $$$ for it. As stated above the way CASL works SATA has a good advantage.

[rocky36]

On our Dell Compellent SAN we always have 15K SAS disks fail and we've never had a 7200 RPM disk fail. So if you ask me I'd tell you that the faster the drive spins the more likely it is to fail!

[jliu79]

Funny I was reading this thread last Friday and thought I probably don't need to worry about this yet as I've only had Nimble up for 3 months and on Saturday I just had my first failed disk! Nimble support was great though as they responded right away.

[BenLoveday]

I guess it really comes down bad batches of disks sometimes. The ones we have are WD Enterprise SATA drives and we've only had one fail so far. I remember when we first put our HP EVA4400 in and due to dodgy firmware we had about 10 FC drives fail in the first six months.