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600GB SFF disks not recognized at P410i - Firmware Bug?

 
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softjury
Occasional Contributor

600GB SFF disks not recognized at P410i - Firmware Bug?

Hi there,

 

i have plenty of DL380 G7 servers in production and purchased

 

4 new EG0600FBDBU drives (600GB SFF 10k DP 6G)

(according to their label all manufactured in march 2012) and inserted them into bay 5-8 in a production server while the server was running.

 

The server has 1 drive cage with bay 1-4 populated with 146GB SFF 15k drives and bays 5-8 were empty.

 

Shortly after inserting the four new drives in bay 5-8 their red LEDs did light up and the Servers solid green Health LED changed to a flashing red.

 

The Server is running Debian Linux so i checked with

 

hpacucli ctrl all show config

 

and only saw the four 146GB drives in bay 1-4. The 600GB drives in bay 5-8 did not show up.

 

The four 600GB drives had Firmware HPD6 on it.

 

HPD7 Firmware mentions a fixed bug that one might think is the cause for this issue:

 

Firmware version HPD7 prevents an initialization handshake issue that could result in the controller not recognizing that the drive is installed.  This results in the drive being reported as bad or missing.

Source

 

So we upgraded the Firmware of these four 600GB disks to the latest as of this writing - Firmware version HPDA(B) - in a seperate server.

 

But even with the newest firmware on the drives (and the newest Firmware 6.00 from Feb/19/2013 on the SmartArray P410i) these four EG0600FBDBU drives were not recognized after hotplug-inserted into a DL380 G7.

 

This has been confirmed with at least 3 different DL380 G7 servers.

 

Sometimes all four of these 600GB drives are not recognized (red LED flashing) by the SmartArray P410i controller.

 

Sometimes one or two of these four 600GB drives are recognized after hotplug insert, but this does not follow any pattern. The ports are not to blame because 72GB disks and 146GB disks do work well in these bays.

 

It does not matter if the server where these EG0600FBDBU drives are hotplug inserted has already drives in it or not.

 

The only known workaround so far, confirmed on 2 servers, is to reboot the server!

Upon boot the already inserted 600GB drives are recognized instantly without problems and can be used as expected (e.g. use ORCA to create a RAID over them).

 

I opened a case with HP, case number 4704574418, and they suggested to completely erase the drives.

 

So i went along and used hpacucli in a DL380 G7 test system to secure erase these drives:

 

hpacucli ctrl slot=0 pd 1I:1:1 modify erase
hpacucli ctrl slot=0 pd 1I:1:2 modify erase
...

This didn't change a thing. After re-enabling these drives after erase finished successfully they again were not recognized when inserted into a running server.

 

HP closed the case and i'm now stuck with exchanging the drives via our HP Partner for new ones - hopefully working ones.

 

The reseller where i bought these drives had bought them directly off HP in a batch of 500 pieces.

 

They didn't have problems with these drives before - but this might be because they sell HP servers with disks populated and when the Servers are powered up with the drives already present ... the bug doesn't show.

 

Also our HP Partner didn't know of any occurance of this issue before.

 

Does anyboby here has seen this problem before?

 

If interested see attached diagnose dump of the controller with all four EG0600FBDBU drives present in bay 1-4 and an additional 72gb disk in bay 5 and a 146gb disk in bay 6. All 6 disks were inserted when the server was already up and running.

 

I bet $5this is a bug in eighter the drives firmware or the controllers firmware.

 

 

 

 

P.S. This thread has been moved from Community Home >Storage >Disk >  to ProLiant Servers (ML,DL,SL). -HP Forum Moderator

3 REPLIES 3
Suman_1978
HPE Pro

Re: 600GB SFF disks not recognized at P410i - Firmware Bug?

Hi,

 

Few things:

Have you tried booting from the SmartStart CD and performing Array configuration or diagnostics or Insight Diagnostics?

Have you checked the cabling inside the server or just added the 4 additional drives?

 

I would suggest check the storage cabling from drive cage to controller, power cables to the cage and cache/battery cabling to controller.

 

Thank You!
I am a HP employee.


I work for HPE.
[Any personal opinions expressed are mine, and not official statements on behalf of Hewlett Packard Enterprise]

Accept or Kudo

softjury
Occasional Contributor

Re: 600GB SFF disks not recognized at P410i - Firmware Bug?

Hi Suman_AN,

 

> Have you tried booting from the SmartStart CD and performing

> Array configuration or diagnostics or Insight Diagnostics?

 

nope. I did all the management and Diagnose Dump while running a Linux Live-CD (http://www.grml.org) with hpacucli CLI.

 

There also were no entries in IML (Integrated Management Log) in the iLO.


> Have you checked the cabling inside the server or just added the 4 additional drives?

 

Cabling is fine. Other drives do work in this server.

 

It's a bit of stretch to indicate cabling issues when indeed this problem was confirmed on 3 different servers.
 
> I would suggest check the storage cabling from drive cage to controller,

> power cables to the cage and cache/battery cabling to controller.

 

As i said - other drives do work in the production server, in the second production server and a third test server.

 

But these EG0600FBDBU drives just didn't function properly when inserted into an already running server.

 

In the mean time our HP partner exchanged one of the four EG0600FBDBU drives and HP sent back a new model:

 

EG0600FBVFP with Firmware HPD6

So we tried this disk in the test server and this time the disk was recognized instantly after inserting it in any bay in an already running server, works like a charm.

 

Our HP partner will now exchange all the remaining EG0600FBDBU disks and hopefully we again get these EG0600FBVFP drives as replacement.

softjury
Occasional Contributor
Solution

Re: 600GB SFF disks not recognized at P410i - Firmware Bug?

As stated in the last post our HP partner exchanged the remaining three EG0600FBDBU drives and got EG0600FBVFP as replacments.

 

An hour ago, all four EG0600FBVFP drives were inserted into our production server and all drives were recognized instantly.

 

So for us this issue is solved. In the future we will try to avoid the faulty EG0600FBDBU drives.

 

This issue should be investigated by HP to warn customers of these drives.