Help. my AJ736A drives are dropping like flies

Occasional Contributor

‎06-06-2012 04:11 PM

Hi Everyone:

All I did was move an MSA2212fc dual controller fiber channel raid shelf with 12, AJ736A, 15k rpm, 300 Gb,

SAS, 3 1/4" enterprise hard drives from one 42U rack to another. I also moved one BL680c G5 server from

one c3000 blade enclosure to another in the same rack as the MSA. Then, I moved the AJ820A SAN switch

and plugged everything in and booted. Only other change was I switched from RAID 5 to RAID 6. The moves

were uneventful. Nothing was bumped or dropped.

I created one large virtual drive and carved it up into 3 equal volumes. Before the move things were fine.

Things were fine for a week or so after the move. Now I'm getting orange LED lights on a few of the hard

drives. It started out with 2 bad drives. I replaced them.

Thinking it might be firmware/drivers, I upgraded the MSA2212fc, the AJ820A SAN switch and the P700M SAS

mezzanine HBA in the blade server to current and searched to see if there was a firmware update for the hard

drives. Didn't find any updates for the drives.

Things were quiet again, but when I came in Monday there was another drive with an orange LED on. On

Tuesday there was another. When I logged into the RAID controller it appears the 2 drives no longer exist. Of

course we have no hardware support and the drives are only warrantied for 3 years. Right now, they're nearly

5 years old.

I've been searching around and this situation isn't discussed anywhere. No mention of the meaning of orange

LEDs on these drives. Can they be recovered with a low level reformat? "New" replacement drives, if you can

fine them, cost between $400 and $500 each. It's killing us. Oh, by the way, the operating system is Windows

2008 R2 Enterprise at SP1

Any ideas?

Dennis Herrick