SCSI Bad Blocks?

[ADB100]

I am not sure this is in the right forum but since these drives have been tested in a PowerEdge 2650 I thought I would post here....

I have several SCSI SCA drives that I am testing (5 * 73GB & 1 * 146GB). They are all supposedly spares to cover three servers that have RAID-5 arrays (only one of the servers is using 146GB drives) and they were purchased as refurbished.
Anyway I booted the PE 2650 and entered the PERC 3/Di BIOS setup utility to verify/format them and out of the five 73GB drives three are reporting absolutely loads of bad blocks. The utility gives you the option of reassigning the blocks which wouldn't be a problem if there were only a few, however its hundreds. The 146GB drive comes up with an even more catastophic error during the verification and only allows you to stop verifying.

I think the 146GB drive is for the bin based on the error, however are the 73GB ones as well? Is there anything I can do or should they be replaced?

Thanks

Andy

 

[burtsbees]

Are they all different manufacturer? The drives will eventually fail with too many bad blocks. Bad blocks are bad blocks, not like HP/Compaq drives where certain failures can be fixed with firmware updates (but not bad blocks). How many bad blocks are we talking? In other words, without RAID, what size do the drives show? Like I say, bad blocks are unrecoverable/unrepairable.
The 146GB drive is not for the bin if it's a single drive...is there only one drive?
Replace them...I would. They will turn up bad. Any warranty on them?

Burt

 

[ADB100]

Hi Burt

The 146GB drive is a Fujitsu MAW3147NC, of the 73GB drives two are Fujitsu that are rebadged 'Worldisk MXJ3073SC800600X' and the other is a HP badged one that also appears to be a Fujitsu (MAT3073NC). Physically they all share the same casings so I assume they are all Fujitsu.

During the verify the 146GB drive comes up with a hard error and the server immediately reports it as failed (orange LED and 'DRIVE FAILED') so I think this is properly screwed. All the 73GB drives report bad blocks during the verify and ask if you want to reassign. It is not just a few though, there are hundreds, so much so that I got tired of hitting 'y' and gave up on two of them at about 10%. On the 3rd one I gave up after about 10 times....

Two of the servers these are supposed to be spares for have RAID-5 volumes using 73GB disks (one has 4 disks the other has 3). The other server has a RAID-5 volume of 3*146GB drives.

I am not sure abour warranty, however they were all purchased as 'refurbished' and not really checked at the time (my bad I know) so I presume not ( They weren't all bought together either.

Andy

 

[burtsbees]

Were the servers purchased as refurbished, or the drives???
But yeah, the drives are trash...
If you can't do anything else but throw them away, at least take the controller boards off of them---they may come in handy as replacements themselves. Don't forget to mark them if you do!

Burt

 

[ADB100]

Were the servers purchased as refurbished, or the drives???

Just the drives. The servers are still in the test lab and are still used, at least they are not production servers.... With RAID-5 they have at least some redundancy (all servers have a mirror for the system drive and a RAID-5 volume for data). These drives were hot-spares in case there was a failure in any of the servers.

It looks like I will need to get some replacements then (

Andy

 

[burtsbees]

IMHO it is NEVER a good idea to buy "refurbished" drives. ALWAYS buy new---you will ALWAYS save $$$ in the long run!

Burt

 

[ADB100]

IMHO it is NEVER a good idea to buy "refurbished" drives. ALWAYS buy new---you will ALWAYS save $$$ in the long run!

I would but new SCSI drives are really expensive, what with the credit crunch and all that its hard to justify it for these 'test' servers. One is running VMWare ESXi and another MS Virtual Server 2005 each with various 'guests' that are switched on when needed.

To be honest I am thinking about ditching these servers and buying a couple of 'normal' PC's - dual or quad-core Dell's or something, as long as they can that can support about 8GB of RAM I can put two SATA 1TB drives in there and mirror them. I'll save on space, power and importantly price.

Andy

 

[technome]

NEVER a good idea to buy "refurbished" drives."
Just to add to Burt's comment.
Refurb/recerts are often failed raid drive returns...you could have one of my returns. I have used numerous SCSI disk test utils on raid drives and unless the drive has a head crash or an obvious PCB component failure they often pass all util tests, even over weeks of continuous testing with multiple test utils. Throw them back into an array, and they fail again.


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Chernobyl disaster..a must see pictorial

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