When is a drive faulty?

[TIM LEAHY]

We get a number of HP 3.5" SCA hotswap drives returned from customer sites with faults such as "failed, red light on drive", "not rebuilding in array" and so on.

When tested with HP Insight Diagnostics they all pass without any faults.

Array Config Utility lets you build them as arays with no status error messages.

Ruling out the possibility of user error, is there any reason why these drives fail on site, but test ok back in our workshop?

[Steven Clementi]

You can't possibly account for every single different customer environmental variable that plays a part in why the disk may have been marked as "failed"..

differences in firmware (hdd AND Array Controller)
heat
different driver versions

to name a few.

The short story... sometimes a disk is not really "bad" even though one system thinks it is "bad"


Steven

[TTr]

I had many of them go bad on a couple of older server environments. In the beginning I would send them back but after a while I would pull them out and reinsert them and they would get going again. I could not figure out the exact cause but I think the cause was one of two things. The drive firmware (hung drive interface) or the server SCSI drivers. Reseating/resetting the drive always fixed the problem.