Hard drive error in Xserve Raid

dana.larson · partially protected Joined: 24 Oct 2006 Posts: 8

I got an alarm on one of my Xserve Raid arrays this morning, and found this in the event log:

Timestamp: 09/10/08 09:49:00 AM
Priority: Warning
Controller: Lower Controller
Type: 112
Event ID: 403
Event: Disk 12 Reported An Error. COMMAND:0x25 ERROR:0x40 STATUS:0x51 LBA:0x28CA5500
Description: The drive reported an ATA error.

Not so coincidentally, one of the video editors reported dropped frames from playback.

It looks to me like a disk is going bad. I have hot spares in every enclosure, how can I force a repair/failover to the spare? And should I ask the users to stay off the SAN while this is happening?

MattG · Xsan Master Joined: 15 Apr 2005 Posts: 456

Many times, an error like this can be eradicated by performing a Background Array Condition on that LUN. This is found in the Utilities Menu. This feature works well even during production since it falls to the background when there is actual I/O happening on the system, and then gets going when things are dormant.

Background Array Conditioning reexamines the LUN for bad blocks and maps them out of use. Most often, the error report you received was due to the interaction with a bad block on one of the drives.

Of course, if you are feeling a particular hatred toward that drive, you can pull it hot, and your spare will go into action rebuilding the RAID set. In this case, it is best to lay off the system until that RAID set rebuilds.