MSA60 drive activity lights flashing at high rate, even when server is idle

[Osman.AKSU]

Hi,
I recently installed a new Proliant DL380 G5 with internal SAS disks connected to the P400 controller and a MSA60 connected to the P800 controller. The strange thing is that the drive activity lights on the disks in the MSA60 are blinking like crazy, even when the server is actually doing nothing. The 4 MSA60 have 9 disks, configured in RAID 6, 2 bead . Total Storage = 4.9 TB per raid Server OS is Linux Redhat 4 . Computer starting after F8 raid configuration. The raid group (Second Raid6) blinking like crazy. What is the problem ?

[kris rombauts]

The smartarray controller performs a continuous surface scan of ech logical drive (but host I/O has a higher priority), so this is why you see the lights flash at a high rate. This is a build in feature in the smartarray f/w to check for any media errors on the disks, you cannot disable this and it has no performance impact because when a host I/O arrives, the surface scan is stopped. In the ACU utility you can configure the time in seconds that the I/O needs to be idle before the surface scan kicks in again.

HTH

Kris