Very frequent disks failures in my EVA 4400

[Yaboto]

There are very frequent failures of disk drives in my EVA 4400. I don't know the reason why this is happening. At time 3 disks can fail simultaneously.Thank God that 99% of the failures are only happening among the UNGROUPED disks, but this is very surprising.

Please Advice.

[Uwe Zessin]

The problem is with the disk drive enclosure I/O modules. The disks are very often fine and keep working after you have reseated them.

[Yaboto]

I have been trying to resit the disks, but in average 98% of the cases, it is still the same scenario.

I have just upgraded the EVA controller firmware from 09522000.SSS to 09534000.SSS successfully, but just after that, 4 disks started showing amber light with FAIL status. The failed disks after the firmware upgrade include 2 previously failed ones that have been resat with green light and 2 new ones: All from the UNGROUP DISKS fortunately.

How can this behaviour be interpreted ?

The firmware revision of the disks is HP06.
Do you recommend a Firmware Upgrade for the disks ?

Please Advice.

Best Regards,
Yaboto

[Uwe Zessin]

From which XCS release did you do the upgrade?
In some cases it is necessary to do a full power-cycle.
In all cases it is necessary to verify that every disk drive enclosure's I/O module has accepted the new firmware.

> The firmware revision of the disks is HP06.

This doesn't mean much to me, sorry. There are different models sold, sometimes with the same, sometimes with a different revision number as 'current'.

But yes, please upgrade to the most recent bundle as suggested in the other thread:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1453006

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi,
do you have many ungrouped disks?
Why?

[Yaboto]

I have 23 grouped disks (default disk group) and 13 ungrouped disks.

I left some disks ungrouped as a way of managing the space allocation: we may need some disks in reserve to create a second disk group in the future.

Please what do you advice me ?

[Yaboto]

Please Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelp !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Uwe Zessin]

If all disk drives are of the same size - put them in one disk group, now. This gives you the best space management - you can always grow an existing virtual disk as long as you cross the 2 TeraBytes barrier and allows all I/Os spread across all disk drives.

It also gives you the most capacity, because with two disk groups you have two so-called "disk group protection levels" (they don't "protect" anything in the form of VRAID, but are the equivalent of virtualized spare disks).