check drives in smart array p410 for health

[urobe]

Hey there everyone,

we have a HP  proliant server with Samrt Array P410 with three HDDs as a RAID 5 running Windows SBS 2008.

The backup is created by Acronis Backup and Recovery 10 to a NAS.

So far we never had any issues, but last night the backup was aborted because of a reading failure.

I restarted the backup and the second time it went through without problems.

None the less, we have a bit of a bad feeling about the HDDS. I tired a couple of programs to test the drives, but as they are only shown as HP logical volume scsi disk,  I wasn't able to test the drives.

I saw that there is a Array configuration tool, that has an diagnose function. While the array with the individual drives is displayed, the diagnose function seems only to work with SSDs.

Is there any way I can test the drives for defec sectors?

Would Checkdisk right after reeboot be able to check the individual dirves? (I somehow doubt it, windows sees it as one disk only)

Any help and hint is greatly appreciated.

-Peter

[Torsten.]

The controller should monitor the drives automatically, make sure the firmware is up to date:

version 6.64:

http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?sp4ts.oid=3984647&swItemId=MTX_55b304486f544f148de6c5cc6e&swEnvOid=4103#tab-history

http://h20564.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?sp4ts.oid=3984647&swItemId=MTX_00b8fc2277334ff486e0034ec6&swEnvOid=4064

[urobe]

Thanks so much for the reply and even more for the links! These are certainly not installed.

Once they are installed, how do I tell that there might be an issue?

[Torsten.]

A typical behaviour you could see is a red blinking LED on the drive meaning a pre-failure warning (too many read/write failures), a disk replacement is recommended.

IF you have updated the controller, you should also search for disk firmware, look into the configuration tool (SSA), check the disk model and search for firmware made for this disk model.

This page may help: https://support.hpe.com/connect/s/product?language=en_US&cep=on&kmpmoid=3883890&tab=manualsAndGuides

[Moderator edit: Updated the broken link.]

[Jimmy Vance]

You might want to read this docment.It explains Smart Array technology and how arrays and drives are monitored for health

 Technical white paper

HP Smart Array Controller technology

http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA5-4124ENW&cc=us&lc=en

[Moderator edit: The above link is no longer valid. Please refer to https://support.hpe.com/]

[gregersenj]

If you do ave doubts on teh physical drives.

The best toll is the Sytame Mangement Homepage (SMH), given the agent and SMH is installed.

From a HW point of view, on ProLiants. SMH is you best freind :)

BR

Jag