SCSI Device Failure, hard drive

[Cory Hug]

We just finished deploying about 50 ProLiant ML350 G4 servers with 36 Gb 15,000 RPM hard drives and internal DAT72 tape drives. No RAID or anything, just using the dual-channel SCSI that's built in to the system board on these servers. Single hot-plug hard drive in bay 0 (which is connected to SCSI channel 1). The DAT72 is non-hot-plug connected to SCSI channel 2.

These are running NetWare 6.5 with SP4 (the latest SP) with Backup Exec for NetWare 9.1 running locally on each server (i.e., no remote backups).

Things were running fine for a few months but now all of a sudden we're seeing servers that every time the backup job runs, the server abends with a SCSI Device Failure of the hard drive. At first I thought it was just a bad hard drive, but now I've got 4 servers doing this so I'm wondering if there is anything else to look at besides just the hard drive. As I said, these are brand new servers only a month old. Is it likely that I've got 4 bad hard drives out of 50 already?

I can reboot the server and it works fine, until the backup job runs again. Also, I've run the Diagnostics program from the SmartStart 7.4 CD and it shows no issues.

Oh, I do also have one server that the hard drive keeps failing just out of the blue, not even when the backup job is running. We just see an error on the NetWare server console that the driver disabled the device and indicates the hard drive. The server doesn't abend, but no volumes are available so we have to reboot the server. But after we reboot the server it's fine again for days or even weeks.

So back to the basic question, am I really looking at 4 bad hard drives already on brand new servers or are there some other things I should I look at?

Thank you.

[Mike Percival_2]

It is possible you may just be unlucky and DO have faulty drives. If the servers were all purchased at the same time, it may be that there is an issue with a batch of drives used on these models. Check the drives model and serial numbers and notify the manufacturer - it may be this is a known problem.

[Roy Main]

Sounds like you need to get ADU reports into your service guy and see if there is something showing that might indicate what's going on.

If you were running Windows you could run a new online test that came out with SS7.4 - Drive Diagnoses. Take some of the drives giving you problems and swap them out of the server to one running Windows. You have to run the "online" version of diags to have the test available.