x346 with exp400 continuous flashing amber drive

[risctechno]

I'm primarily an AIX guy but trying to help someone who has a exp400 attached to an x346 with a serveRAID adapter. One drive has been in the identy/rebuild state for a couple days. I want to fail the drive (defunct) but not sure how to access the serveRAID Manager utility to do so. I believe it is a 6M adapter. The drives are U320 SCSI.

Thank You...

 

[rclarke250]

Is ServeRAID manager actually installed on the server? if so, log in and start the application up, if it isn't already running, locate the drive from the array and fail it to DDD. If not, you can go to the IBM support portal and locate a ServeRaid CD, download and burn it. boot to it. this will also give you the option to update the FW of the adapter to the latest level on the cd and fail it through that interface.

 

[risctechno]

The external array displayed a failed (DDD) drive and a rebuilding (formerly a hot spare)drive. Problem was the rebuild was going on for several days. Once the ServeRAID Manager was installed it showed about 30% rebuilt. While the utility was running it completed the rest of the rebuild in an hour. Question, is it recovering data from the defunct drive? If the defunct drive was removed (and not hot swapped with a replacement can it recover all the lost data from the defunct drive?

 

[rclarke250]

It does not use the defunct drive to rebuild the data, It uses the raid array and the raid adapter to recreate the drive from the array that is missing. But a defunct drive still on the bus may affect speed of the transfer, depending on how the drive failed. Also, rebuild takes place in the background to try to maintain throughput of active read/write requests, which it then has to factor in for rebuild and move data around to different places to recreate the array as it was, plus any new data that was added since the array went critical.