Best way to test SCSI U320 Drives?

[Whizzergo]

Evening All,

I wandered if anybody could point me in the right direction as to how me might best go about testing a large batch of SCSI U320 drives?

We currently have approximately 400 of these on hand, and although the vast majority will be fine, they do need checking before we can confidently send them out with machines.

Obviously time is also of the essence here.

Could we safely assume that starting a DL380 G4 and entering the Array Config Meun to create an array, is a fairly reliable manner of testing? With the drives being SMART enabled, they will usual be reported as dead by this stage, if there is indeed a fault with them.

If anybody has a better suggestion as to how we could run through such a large batch of drives effectively, please let me know.

Thanks

[JohnWRuffo]

Unless you have a drive cabinet to do the same 'test' in (so you can test more drives at a time), 400 drives is going to take a while...

just be aware that you will be setting signatures on the drives that will need to be rewiped when you do finally make permanent arrays out of them (you may get array confusion with the signatures).

You are not going to get a "real burn in test" unless you use the hardware diags (SmartStart CD) against them... you may (if only) get a hard fault error on the health LED if the drive does not pass POST. Without diags you may never know the resiliancy of the drive once it has an array with data and time to determine if you have bad secors or some other issues.

[Michael A. McKenney]

Connect 15 to each SCSI cable on the dual channel SCSI controller. Run diagnostics on each drive. If you are going to wipe them, it could take a few weeks.