HP P822 - Degraded array isnt available

[5teve]

Hi Guys

Running the above card with 12x drives in raid 6 in a white box and have been chasing some intermittent degraded performance - reads and writes sometimes as low as 250mb/s but sometimes as high as 2500mb/s so i was wondering if a drive was on the go slow or had some wierd power saving going on.. so I planned on pulling a drive at a time, checking the power mode, and benchmarking it just to see if one was particularly slow or anything like that..

So pulled the first drive.. booted into windows.. and HP SSA shows degraded / drive missing - but the logical drive / volume are not available to windows.. My understanding is that it should still run and data be available. but in a degraded fashion until the disk is replaced...

Any thoughts? Is it a white box issue?

Steve

 

[mrkrad]

did the array finish constructing before you pulled the drives? the slow init of a large raid-6 can cause performance oddities as well!

 

[5teve]

Yep the array has been in place for several weeks. They actually initialise pretty quickly given the size of the array (somewhere around 24 hours) and generally the performance stays reasonable while initialising.

All previous experience of Raid controllers has been the logical drive still being available when the array is degraded. It kind of defeats the object if during a drive failure, the data is unavailable!

Steve

 

[5teve]

Interesting... found this relating to an older HP system...

If a drive or enclosure has been removed or disconnected, do the following:

1. Power down the server.
2. Check cabling.
3. Power up the server and storage enclosure at the same time.
   

If this does not work, replace the cable(s) and connection(s).

If drives are failed or purposely removed while the system is off:

1. Reboot the server.
2. When prompted during POST, press F2 to fail the missing drives.

This seems to incinuate that if the drives are removed in power off, you have to enter the bios and fail them for the array to work... which is a problem as I cant get into the bios! (white box issue)

Steve