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

[Hans van Breen]

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 MSA60 has 8 disks, configured in RAID-10. Server OS is Windows Server 2003 R2.
Is this normal behaviour?

[Rob Leadbeater]

Hi,

> I recently installed a new Proliant DL380 G5

If the server has just been installed, then it's possible that the RAID initialisation is still taking place. That would account for the activity lights flashing.

Cheers,

Rob

[Torsten.]

Don't worry that much.

Rob has already mentioned a possible reason.

The real strange thing are the LEDs itself - they are blinking all the time.

At 1Hz if idle, irregularly if busy - as a result of this mix they are always blinking irregularly (at least this is what I see).


See the users manual, chapter "SAS and SATA hard drive LED combinations".

[kris rombauts]

Hans,

this is normal and because the SmartArray controller does a continuos surface scan (health check) of the array.

In the ACU utility you can configure the idle time after which this process kicks in, so when x-seconds of no I/O is detected, the surface scan starts where it left of before and it does this continiously, so when one cycle is done, it starts a new one. This idle time is a global setting at the controller level.

In the ADU report (if available for your OS) you can check the number of times this surface scan has been succesfully done.

So basically it is a internal raid health check which has been in the SmartArray firmware since many years.
It does not affect the I/O performance since I/O has priority on this surface scan.


HTH

Kris