MSA1000 Continuous Disk Activity

[John_942]

I have a new MSA1000 with an MSA30 running F/W Version 4.32. I have built 3 LUNs with an RAID 5 array on each LUN. Each Array has 9 146GB 10K drives, and I have the one disk left assigned as a spare to each array. I am connected via Fiber Channel. The MSA has a single fiber channel card.

The first arrays disks are indicating continuous disk activity, however the logs indicate the array is complete and functional. The disks show activity even when the server is shut down.

Is there anything else I can check to see what is going on? Does anyone know of anything obvious that might be happening? Any suggestions for things to try would be appreciated.

[Uwe Zessin · Accepted solution]

The MSA1000 does a surface analysis when it is idle - nothing to worry about.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c00062748

[John_942]

I understand that is normal from the article, however it is only doing it on one of the arrays, array 1. I also have 3 other MSA1000's and it doesnt appear to be doing it on those boxes.

What brought this up is the lack of performance during backups, I am only getting around 10 mbs, on the old disk system I was getting 15 mbs. Any Ideas?

[John Kufrovich]

Are you running virus protection.

[John_942]

There is no virus scan on this PC

[Greg Carlson]

John,

If this is a new system, it might be currently in a background parity check on the array. It performs the background parity check when there is no i/o, so if the server is off the MSA would be performing the background consistency/parity check. It takes a while to complete. If you are concerened about the state of the array. You can run the ADU (Array Dignostic Utility) and post the results here for us to review.

Install the latest ADU from here:
http://h18023.www1.hp.com/support/files/server/us/download/21867.html

Ciao,
Greg

[John Kufrovich]

If you have access to the CLI,
Do a

>show this_controller

Towards the end of the print out will be surface scan info with LUN and percentage of completion.