Fun with an MD1200/MD1220 & SC200/SC220

[Sellular]

Has anyone found a reliable way to spindown/spinup the harddrives, or the enclosure itself? I see there's a `_shutdown` command that can be used to power off the unit, but not sure if there's a good way to remotely turn it back up. Or if I should look into spinning down/up the hard drives themselves?

I'm asking because I recently (finally) got a UPS and this would be helpful in the case of a power outage to conserve internet up-time. I'm already turning off my servers automatically when power outage occurs so doing so on my MD1200 would be helpful too. Not sure if figuring out how to hack something together to turn off/on the connections to the power cables would work too

 

[PatchouliTC]

Has anyone found a reliable way to spindown/spinup the harddrives, or the enclosure itself? I see there's a `_shutdown` command that can be used to power off the unit, but not sure if there's a good way to remotely turn it back up. Or if I should look into spinning down/up the hard drives themselves?

I'm asking because I recently (finally) got a UPS and this would be helpful in the case of a power outage to conserve internet up-time. I'm already turning off my servers automatically when power outage occurs so doing so on my MD1200 would be helpful too. Not sure if figuring out how to hack something together to turn off/on the connections to the power cables would work too

i have read dell manual,it seems that `_shutdown` command may used when emm failed/temp to high/lost one power module too long,so i think this command used for shutdown if sys will be break in emm internal;

Also I find a post here [How to perform a graceful shutdown of MD3220 | DELL Technologies] this guy was look for soft shutdown because building power outage,it also show that DELL Modular Disk Storage Manager app has no option to "soft shutdown.",and dell Moderator says " Yes you are correct to power off the MD’s you will just flip the switch or pull the power cord. "
So i believe if power down,just make sure your hba card device success shutdown,then just wait ups shutdown[only sure when enclosure lost power no device use it] and just do nothing.(maybe when power back,your hbd card device should wait 1~2minute for MD1200 start then power on)
After all, looking at it from another perspective, the act of switching the power button on and off is similar to the act of keeping the power button on to turn the power on and off.

 

[mr44er]

Or if I should look into spinning down/up the hard drives themselves?

This! Let the disks do it on their own.

System hanging when trying to spin-up from HD idle

I've searched an found that sometimes LSI's SAS controllers will hang up when HDs are woken up from an idle state (idled using hd-idle). I'm experiencing this with my pve system. I've even swapped out controller cards using a different LSI controller and the problem persists. At this point, I...

forum.proxmox.com

 

[logixworx]

I have two SC220 stacked in the front of a closed 42u rack cabinet - I want to redirect 4u of SC220 exhaust into 2u of open space in the rear. I feel the SC220 exhaust is too far from the back of the cabinet anyway and may be blowing heat into the cab through the sides. Think of modifying a cantilever shelf into a baffle with a sloped top and sides. I could move my APC 7900B into that space. Any issue with this design?




illustration

 

[Flipt]

Thanks to everyone that contributed to this thread. I was about to do a fan swap before coming across this thread. Opted to try the serial cable method instead which is now working great. A cron job was scheduled to run the following script every minute:

#!/bin/bash
for i in {1..10}
do
stty -F /dev/ttyS0 speed 38400 cs8 -ixon raw
echo -ne "_shutup 20\n\r" > /dev/ttyS0
sleep 5
done
exit

 

[Andyman!]

Just made this account to say a huge thank you.


I'm completely new to the server world, and this is my first time diving into Dell gear. I made the rookie mistake of buying an SFF Dell server thinking I’d save myself £100… only to find out the largest spinning disk it supports is 2TB. That was a blow.


So I picked up a Dell MD1200 shelf and everything needed to expand — and suddenly that £100 saving turned into an extra £300 with cables, PCIe cards, and everything else.


When I powered it all on, the fans were insanely loud — my server lives right next to my desk (despite my wife’s best efforts to move it), and even she said she could live with the noise... but I couldn't.


After a full day of reading your posts and retrying things, I finally managed to get serial access working using a DIY cable setup. I went from 70dB down to 40dB just by running set_speed 20, and the difference is unreal — the room feels peaceful again.


I didn’t want to spend £30 on a prebuilt cable, so I DIY’d it for around £25 using different adapters and breakouts. It took a bit longer, but I learned so much along the way, and that knowledge is absolutely priceless.


Thank you again for sharing this info — you saved my ears, my sanity, and possibly my marriage.

 

[RCLapCar]

I thought I would post this to help out anyone still looking for a cable to connect to the MD1200. I was looking for some cables to quiet down multiple MD1200's and went down the many serial port rabbit hole. After some unrelated browsing I came across this item on Aliexpress.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005345205637.html

Basically this is a cable that has a USB connector on one end (with a serial to usb chip in it) and the 6 pin DIN connector on the other end. This lets you just plugin the USB into a server/PC and the other end directly into the MD1200. Works on Linux and Windows (with driver from Windows Update, so no sketchy files to install). No need for a serial port, serial to USB adapter or the password reset cable (or a hacked together one). This specific item is NOT for the MD1200 but if you contact the seller they will make one for the MD1200 instead. This store can make any sort of serial cables custom. They are in China so chatting with them happened in the evening for me but they were super responsible and the cables arrived in less than 2 weeks. Have been working without issue for a month now keeping the damn MD1200 fans quiet.

One more thing, when you go to that link make sure to select the second "color" option for the "USB-MD6 (FT232RLChip)" to get the version of the cable with the USB connector and serial to USB chip. The other option is basically a replica of the Dell password reset cable (just cheaper). You can also customize the length if you wish but I just went for the shortest one. In retrospect I probably could have asked them for a shorter cable as well but didn't think of that at the time.

Hope this helps someone.

 

[jabuzzard]

The SC200/SC220 are rebranded PowerVault MD1200/MD1220's which were a Dell designed/built product. The only other product which looks like it uses the same enclosure/backplane part number is some of the EqualLogic products like the PS4100. I've never tried this swap, and if it does work then you are limited by the licensing and software of the EQL product. This design very much follows the KISS principal, which I am a huge fan of for the simplicity and it being very reliable.

This is not true. The MS1200/MD1220 are most emphatically NOT designed and built by Dell. They are rebranded Engenio devices, originally from LSI, but the line was sold to NetApp in 2011. This holds for the entire PowerVault MD storage line from Dell.

The fact that you can turn an MD3200 into an MD1200, but the MD3200i and MD3600f can be managed by the same software that controls an IBM DS4200, DS4400, DS4500, DS4700, DS4800, and DS3400 something I have personally done. There are other IBM DS storage products that could be added to the list but those are the ones I have personally used. That should be a giant clue that they are not designed/built by Dell. It was also OEM'ed by Sun/Oracle in at least the StorageTek 2500 line (though they did their own management software from scratch, which is entirely different) and even by NetApp themselves in various FS arrays. There are probably others but these are the ones I have personally used.

Go Google some pictures of the Dell MD3060e and IBM DCS3700, and tell me that those are not the same OEM product with different branding.

I am pretty sure that the ME line is descended from Dot Hill rather than Xyratex, too. The storage array software on the ME line is definitely Dot Hill in origin.

 

[midnight1234]

Just wanted to say thank you for the knowledge!! I just successfully flashed a MD3200 to a MD1200 for a home media server. Saved me a couple hundred dollars since the MD1200 usually sells for more.

 

[jabuzzard]

Ok, a weird one. After much hassle in getting a working serial port on a Windows machine, which ultimately involved me dragging the MD3200 out of the data centre to access a Windows machine with a serial port. I have flashed it to be an MD1200 via the serial port using TeraTerm, and everything is working as expected. Has anyone done this on Linux with screen and sx out of lrzsz, as it didn't work for me? As I type this, I wonder if the issue was with the USB 3 port on my laptop, as the adapter worked just fine on the server, but didn't work under either Windows 10 or Linux on my laptop, hum.

The two EMMs I had acquired were version 1.05, so I flashed them to 1.06 using sg_write_buffer. Everything is still good.

As it was initially an MD3200, the ready light meaning was inverted on the drives. No problem, I used sdparm to flip it on one drive at random, and it ended up being slot 2. That worked as expected, so I then ran the command to clear the RLM bit on all the drives.

Now, what is weird is that the ready light does not come on, regardless of the drive I put in slot 2, even though the drive itself is fine and believes the ready light should be on. The LED doesn't flicker either when doing IO on the drive. Power cycling both the attached server and the MD1220 makes no difference. It's like the ready light LED is dead. However, it seems unlikely to me that you could kill the ready light LED on a slot by running an "sdparm --clear=RLM --save /dev/sdxx" on a drive where the ready light meaning has already cleared.

I don't see anything on the serial console that allows me to manipulate the ready light. Does anyone have any ideas, or is the backplane knackered? I have yet to take the cover off and start probing with the oscilloscope.