Cleaning external vents

[Ayman Altounji]

Does Compaq have a recommendation on daily/weekly/monthly/annual cleaning of the external vents for hard drives? We have a model RA8000 SAN and the disks closest to the floor have a large amount of dust and other particles trapped in the vents. Should we be cleaning these, if so how?

We have had three of these disks fail recently, and 2 of them were near the floor where the particulate accumulation is the greatest. Any information would be helpful.

[Ayman Altounji]

Compaq have recently recognised this disk failure problem (I had the same problem in a clean COMMS room), and have released a patch for ACS running on HSG80 and HSG60 controllers. This is an extract from what was mailed to me:

"Storage sets comprised of stripe sets (RAID 0 sets) or JBODs on HSG80 or HSG60 based storage systems are susceptible to a failure to maintain bad block status as determined by a previous unrecoverable read operation. RAID 1, 5, and 0+1 storage sets are not affected. Scope: All HSG60/80 customers, particularly those employing JBOD and stripe set (RAID 0) storage sets, must install the ACS v8.6x-8 critical patch. Note that it will be necessary for the controller to have this patch installed in order to install any subsequent patches that may be released."

So I reckon you should contact your Compaq rep for the patch, not sure whether it's freely downloadable from the www.

Regards, Ben.