MSA50 SAS drives

[David Heiert]

I have 2 MSA50's attached to a DL360 with a P800 controller. The disk lights are always flashing whenever the OS (2008 R2) is loaded. The build of the disk is complete and there are no errors in ACU.

Any idea why this would be and is it normal?

[kris rombauts]

David,

the SmartArray controller does a continious health check of the RAID array, this is why you will see activity even when the host is not really doing much I/O to the disk subsystem.

When host I/O is performed, the surface scan is moved to a lower priority and host I/O gets the priority. In the ACU utility under Controller Settings, you can configure the time as of when the surface scan can kick in again when the host is i.e. 10 seconds idle and performs no I/O.
This behaviour is indepedent of the OS that runs on the server, it is a firmware feature.


HTH

Kris