Drive "failures" and testing

[janusj]

Hi All,

I have a 9260-16i that I had hooked up to 5 wdc30ezrs 3tb and 4 st3000DM001 drives - I've had the wdc drive up and running on a different setup for a while and all seemed well with them, but only very recently acquired the Seagate drives.

I know one of the seagates is faulty cause it's making a racket - sounds like the drive is full of grit..

I set up a virtual drive using megaraid with the rest of the drives and got a LOAD of beeping.. apparently the other 3 seagate drives are faulty too..
I deleted the virtual drive - and plugged each drive into the mb sata connectors, and prepared to do some testing. *sigh*

In the meantime I set up a raid 5 of my remaining wdc drives - at least I knew they'd be alright...wrong..
About 10mins after creating the virtual drive I was once more harassed by beeping hell, allegedly now one of my wdcs had failed, more testing..

Here's the thing..

The noisy one is dead - doesn't even "detect" any more, so I'll focus on the rest.

Using the windows7 drive manager;
All drives initialize correctly (gpt)
All drives format correctly (Full format)
All drives surface scan correctly (NO bad block)

however using seatools;
No drives pass ANY test
Not the short ones OR the long ones
Sadly I can only use the version that runs under windows as it would appear the fdos based ISO available from Seagate doesn't function with my sata controllers.

I've just started DLGDIAG for windows - and this far seagate number is passing all tests..apparently I still have 4hours left on the surface test (*yawn!*)

What is the story here- is the LSI controller just being mega picky, or what is going on? Have I missed some feature/bug/incompatibility with my drives?

Any help, thoughts, comments appreciated..

 

[janusj]

Did a bit more digging and found this...

..
http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public.../MegaRAID_Value_Feature_Interop_List_SAS2.pdf
..

Like a fool I never knew of the HCL..turns out my drives aren't on the "list" I guess that means the lsi controller may or may not (as is the case it'd seem) be happy with the drives.

There goes that "server build" down the tubes..

 

[mobilenvidia]

What Mobo you runnig it on ?

Can you raid5 them on the onboard controller to test.

My evil plan is to use the 2.5TB WDC versions of this drive with the IBM M5015 (LSI9260) in RAID5
So would be nice to get you sorted before I spend my hard earned $$

I do remember my card started beeping at bootup all of sudden (its loud) quite a while back
I couldn't find any issue, so I turned it the alarm off, and have not had any issues with it since.

 

[janusj]

I'm on an Asus p9x79 pro. The onboards won't do raid5 in win7 ..

How did you turn off the beeping, its killing me?

 

[mobilenvidia]

Not in my office right now.

I'm pretty sure you can turn it off somewhere in MSM

 

[janusj]

Not in my office right now.

I'm pretty sure you can turn it off somewhere in MSM

I'll have another look around - all I could find was the "silence alarm" but that doesn't do anything permanent.. I was nearly scrabbling around boxes for my old soldering iron before I eventually dismantled the drive configuration.

I you happen to come across it pls let me know.

 

[mobilenvidia]

Have a look in the BIOS (reboot CTRL+C), it could be in there.

I've taken the M5015 out to get it ready for the HTPC build.
But do need to flash it to a FW with Drive spin down so may chuck it back in.

 

[janusj]

Thanks - you were spot on!

The feature is in the "controller" section - if anybody else is reading this it's worth noting that you will only gain acess to the "WebBIOS" if you have a Virtual drive defined - fo some reason if you don't the system just gives you a line of text (but no time to read it) and buggers off into your OS.

I had to press Control+H but that may well vary from controller to controller.

For now at least it would appear that my mixture of drives is working well - Obviously the seagates are completely wasted on this config - actually considering sellingthem in order to swap for some 54k sata2 drives to match the wdcs...seems a shame to not use them to their fullest somehow.

Thanks again Mobilenvidia

 

[mobilenvidia]

To get to the webBIOS at non Array times you need to press the 'boot to device' button at boot time then at the device choose screen choose the controller.

Whoops CTRL+C = LSI HBA, CTRL=H = LSI RAID

I think with a uEFI BIOS you can enter at the System BIOS page (hope to test this soon)

 

[janusj]

To get to the webBIOS at non Array times you need to press the 'boot to device' button at boot time then at the device choose screen choose the controller.

Whoops CTRL+C = LSI HBA, CTRL=H = LSI RAID

I think with a uEFI BIOS you can enter at the System BIOS page (hope to test this soon)

Great stuff, Thanks.

I'm happy to report that -for now at least- all is well..
I'm still awaiting a refund for the 1 drive that failed completely - but the rest of them appear to be doing well.