Hey All,

So I have a *really* strange issue here. I was recently given a Dell T620 server, and I'm having issues with getting it to play nice with some SATA drives I've dropped into it.

I should start off by saying they are not dell certified drives, they're cheap second hand refurbished 1TB 2.5" Toshiba drives I'm sticking in one big RAID5 array with a hot spare. Presently there are 5 drives in the array.

One of the drives comes up fine, but four of them are exhibiting strange behaviour. They work ... but .....

When showing in the RAID controller, they have a disk id of "--:--:08" and "--:--:09", etc, and are flashing orange on the status light. The disks can be added to arrays not a problem, there are no SMART errors and for all intents and purposes they work fine, there's just this annoying flashing yellow light on them. The drives work with no errors in other devices, just something about the Dell is off. The error the box is throwing is a PDR1001 error which, as best I can tell usually represents a SMART imminent failure error, however there is no such error on the actual drives themselves.

Here comes the interesting part. I had given up on finding a fix for this, and just, to let the orange lights flash, but, when I set up the iDRAC today, I found, that it may not be a problem with the RAID controller or the drives after all, but something that the SAS/SATA enclosure is doing strangely. When looking in the iDRAC web interface, the ports that contain the drives that are "faulting" are reporting as empty. The one drive of this type that isn't faulting is reporting as being there. I can remove and reinsert the drives as many times as I want, the enclosure still believes the drives are not inserted. If I juggle them around, the one drive that reports as there, reports in any slot that I insert it into. I'm assuming there must be something slightly different about this drive (other than the serial number) to make it not throw an error, but I'm damned if I can figure out what.

All drives are of the same make and model, all running the same firmware revision.

So, does anybody have any idea why my enclosure might think there are no drives present in the slot, when there actually are, despite the fact that they show up in the controller and can be added into a functioning array?

Hi,

A few questions about a T130 with 2 Seagate drives on a PERC H330, RAID 1.

I see there's a firmware update for the drives. Just to verify, according to the System Configuration we have Dell Part number W69TH which is a ST1000NM0033-9ZM173 Seagate Constellation, correct? Then the update applies to us, and I see it's urgent.

Question: How do you apply a HDD firmware update to 2 drives behind a RAID card? Never had the pleasure before, just thought I'd ask since the installation instructions don't say anything about it.

What's up with these drives anyway? Kind of unusual to see so many firmware updates for a hard drive. Makes me wonder if I should just replace them.

On a related matter:

Bearing in mind that this is a simple standalone tower server:

What Server Management software should we have installed at a minimum, to do routine tasks like monitor the health of the drives, nothing fancy?

I ask because when I look at the Systems Management category on Drivers & Downloads I see 32 entries, and my eyes glaze over.

So what should I install at a bare minimum? Windows Server 2012 R2 installed.

Thanks in advance!

Only about 15 captcha's this time. Will someone please fix this?!?!?!

Hi, I am after a SATA controller for my Dell 720. I do not want a Raid controller, just a SATA controller. Can you suggest one?

Thanks..

Had a lot of five year old 3TB and 4TB SAS drives fail this year on an H810, RAID6.  Maybe to be expected.

Some questions:

1.) Who fails the drive?  The H810 or Openmanage?

2.) OpenManage doesn't show SMART info so I decided to look at it.  'smartmontools' will read SAS drive SMART (I put the drives on a simple HBA to do this).  Here's the output from an older Seagate which is clearly bad-

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: DATA CHANNEL IMPENDING FAILURE GENERAL HARD DRIVE FAILURE [asc=5d, ascq=30]

Current Drive Temperature:     26 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        50 C

Manufactured in week 24 of year 2013
Specified cycle count over device lifetime:  10000
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  72
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime:  300000
Accumulated load-unload cycles:  10924
Elements in grown defect list: 85

Vendor (Seagate) cache information
  Blocks sent to initiator = 2497332109
  Blocks received from initiator = 224501625
  Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 869607790
  Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 5289426
  Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 0

Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information
  number of hours powered up = 27741.20
  number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 58

Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:   1488533785       28         0  1488533813         28      28404.120           0
write:         0        0         1         1          1       2604.920           0
verify: 27761909      515         0  27762424        865     408573.176         349

Non-medium error count:        1

SMART Self-test log
Num  Test              Status                 segment  LifeTime  LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ]
     Description                              number   (hours)
# 1  Reserved(7)       Completed                  32       2                 - [-   -    -]
# 2  Background short  Completed                  48       0                 - [-   -    -]
Long (extended) Self Test duration: 32700 seconds [545.0 minutes]

But here's the output of a Toshiba replacement that Dell sent me under warranty that was also failed:

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Health Status: OK

Current Drive Temperature:     24 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        65 C

Manufactured in week 08 of year 2017
Specified cycle count over device lifetime:  50000
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  27
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime:  600000
Accumulated load-unload cycles:  172
Elements in grown defect list: 0

Error counter log:
           Errors Corrected by           Total   Correction     Gigabytes    Total
               ECC          rereads/    errors   algorithm      processed    uncorrected
           fast | delayed   rewrites  corrected  invocations   [10^9 bytes]  errors
read:          0        0         0         0          0      30182.858           0
write:         0        0         0         0          0       3030.824           0
verify:        0        0         0         0          0       3000.662           0

Non-medium error count:        5

No self-tests have been logged

So my second question is why was the Toshiba, a new drive that is healthy, failed?

Thanks, Art

Hi Friends,

I have DELL R710 with Controller PERC 6/i Integrated. We found that the battery for Controller PERC 6/i Integrated has failed with below details in OMSA, 

State - Failed

Learn State - Idle

Next Learn Time - 8 days 20 hours

Maximum Learn Delay - 7 days 0 hours

Learn mode - Auto

This server is connected to a UPS line and I am afraid that the above battery failure cause any issue to the RAID configuration even if it runs continuously ?
What is the above message saying exactly ?

Can anyone please explain ?. Do I need to change the battery immediately ?

We are contemplating purchasing one used PE C6300 chassis  with three C6320 compute blocks.  

1.  Can anyone describe how one allocates hard drives in the 24-HDD collection to each compute block?  Are there any limitations to what can be allocated to each block?

2.  If we create a RAID partition and allocate it to a specific compute block and that compute block subsequently dies, is it a straight-forward thing to import the RAID partition with another compute block?  Are there any issues to consider when doing this?

Thanks in advance.

Have PE 1950 with a UCS-51 SAS controller, but need to purchase a PERC 5/i RAID controller in order to replicate a customer's server.

I'm pretty sure WX072 is the model number I need - but there seems to be an optional cache and/or battery pack that comes with it.  I've noticed looking at pictures of it that there appears to be a RAM module fitted - is this the cache?  And is the battery pack used for this, or something else?

Please excuse all my dumb questions, just trying to figure out if these are absolutely required, or optional to make it run faster or something?

I have an R730 server that has an H730 mini installed already, can I add a second controller that is the H730 pcie card?

thanks

Jeremy

PowerEdge T310, H700, RAID 1, 650GB SAS Expand to 2TB SAS

As I recall, I've done this about 5 years ago, but I'm bouncing this off the group:
1.  Backup
2.  Pull a 650GB from the RAID 1, replace it with a 2TB, and let it rebuild.
3.  Pull the remaining 650GB from the RAID 1, replace it with a 2TB, and let it rebuild.
4.  Backup 2
5.  In the H700, expand the virtual drive into the remaining space.
6.  Boot into SBS 2008, expand the data volume into the unused space.
7.  Start new ShadowProtect backup chain.
*As I recall, if I don't do it this way, I need to create an array, run the Dell operating system install up to the point of the install, and then stop it, and restore the volumes using the ShadowProtect backup software.

i have an older PowerEdge T110II with a Perc S100 Raid controller.  I configure my 2 1TB drives (ive tried both raid 1 and 0).  After its done configuring the RAID i See "ready" next to my virtual disks.  I reboot the server and go into my ESXI host and try adding the virtual disk.  Instead of seeing that 1 virtual disk I see the 2 independent drives.

*the drives are the same size, brand and model.

Good day

I am having some trouble trying to figure out why one SSD in a RAID 10, eight drives total, is reading as "disk.direct" while all others, including in another RAID set, all read "disk.bay."

All drive bays are populated. 24 disks total. The other 16 are also in a RAID 10, but normal HDDs. Using a PERC H730P (X4TTX)

I don't have access to the physical server, but these are the details I was given..

The "bad" disk readout (actual disk tests good in diagnostics and shows 100% life remaining in management, no faults in iDRAC)

 2 2 4711 1 DCIM_PhysicalDiskView InstanceID Disk.Direct.22:RAID.Integrated.1-1 string DCIM_PhysicalDiskView DeviceDescription string Disk 22 on Integrated RAID Controller 1 Disk 22 on Integrated RAID Controller 1

The rest of the disks readout like this:

2 2 4711 1 DCIM_PhysicalDiskView InstanceID Disk.Bay.23:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1 string DCIM_PhysicalDiskView FQDD string Disk.Bay.23:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1 Disk.Bay.23:Enclosure.Internal.0-1:RAID.Integrated.1-1

Why would disk 22 be labeled as "disk.direct" and not "disk.bay?" Also, why would it read as "on integrated RAID controller" while the other disks all read "Enclosure.Internal....."

Other drives have been inserted into slot 22 but the same thing happens. The drive is blinking amber but only After boot up and doesn't light up with the rest of the drives On bootup. 

Maybe a bad backplane slot? I wanted to ask here first as swapping out a backplane will be a whole production that we are, of course, trying to avoid if not needed. 

Thanks for any help / insight

Hi,

I have the biggest issue right now. I have a PowerEdge Sever with 3 MD1200 direct attached storage. The MD1200 are connected via H800 Perc controller.

I remotely rebooted the server this morning and it got stuck during the boot process. I can by the office only to see the screen shows that a drive was removed. I power cycled it and hit any key to continue. To my surprise, the bios did not see any drives on the Perc H800. it did see the virtual drive that were configured on the H710P controller which houses my boot OS.

When I went to the raid management. it has a failed disk. I have it set to raid 10 so I was under the impression that it will still work regardless of a failed disk.

I'm now in a dilemma on whether to rebuild the array without initializing the disk. The MD1200 houses multiple DB's for my SQL. I do not want to loose any data. I have a full backup yesterday but I'd rather not loose any data on the disk.

My question is why did it loose the array configuration? How can I rebuild back the VD array without  erasing any data on the drives.

Anybody here that had the same issue, please point me to the right direction.

Good afternoon, dear technical support! I have a disk produced by Seagate(Dell), model ST2000NM0055-1V4104 with firmware DA03, serial number of my drive - ZC20DRT0. The server in which I used the disks of this model broke down and is a long time in repair. I need such a disk to work, I freed it from the data and want to use it in my home computer. This disc makes an unpleasant noise during idle time. Read on the Internet that you need to update the firmware of this disk, I have a version DA03 and I need to update the firmware to version DA06, info from link update -

Seagate DA06 for model number(s) ST4000NM0035-1V4107, ST2000NM0055-1V4104 and ST1000NM0055-1V410C.

This release contains firmware version DA06 for Seagate drives. Vendor model numbers ST4000NM0035-1V4107, ST2000NM0055-1V4104 and ST1000NM0055-1V410C.
Fixes & Enhancements
Fixes:
-Fix an issue where hardware error is reported instead of unrecoverable medium error
-Fix DST to handle interruption without unexpected termination
-Fix issues where assert event can result
-Fix issues where timeout event can result
-Fix issues where IOEDC error can result
-Fix issues where hang event can result

______________________________________________________________________________

on a home computer I have an operating system Windows 8.1 x64, I downloaded the update file for the version Windows x64 (Serial-ATA_Firmware_R100W_WN64_DA06_A00.EXE), I ran it to update the firmware, but the program gave me the following message -

I thought that the problem in the version of my operating system and installed on my home computer Windows 2012 Server R2 Standard, but unfortunately I get the same error when trying to update the firmware of my drive.

dear tech support! I really need to update the firmware for my  Dell ST2000NM0055-1V4104 to last firmware DA06, help me please do this. Sincerely, Alexander

Need some proper advice here.  I have a PE840 with a PERC 5/i RAID controller.  I'm getting 3 volumes failed on boot and the system won't boot.  One drive blinks yellow so clearly, it's dead.  The other three drives are green, however, in the RAID config Drive 0 (the dead one) and Drive 2 list as foreign.   I've already recovered critical files to another location HOWEVER, I'd love to get this server backup if I could.  

The question is as follows.  Do I choose CLEAR or IMPORT?  The config on the controller is correct.  I don't want to wipe that.  I can't find a clear answer on what I should do with Disk 2.  All I want to do is see if I can re-include this drive and see if the RAID will rebuild.  

Any advice would be helpful.  I'm sort of in a time crunch here.  

Thanks 

Rob

I tried to install ESXi on a brand new Dell PE R740, but during the installation it does not see my virtual disk. Before installing VMWare, I first created a RAID6 vdisk and did a fast initialisation. When I boot from the VMWare installer on an USB drive, it only shows the USB drive as an option to install to. I have also tried to install it from a virtual disk image using the Dell LifeCycle Controller software (which loads drivers specific for the OS installation), but same result here. Any ideas?

After ordering the H700 to upgrade my R310, i realize the kit was not included.   All i received was the  RAID card.  I am missing the battery, battery cable, and a SAS cable that is long enough to reach the raid card on Riser2. 

I need the part numbers for the rest of the kit.  

The raid card seems a bit ....unsteady on riser 2.  Is there a way to lock it in place?

Thanks in advance,

Jennifer

Hi,

I would like to repurpose a T605 that has been demoted to a Windows 10 machine to run applications.  However, Office 2016 will not install on SBS2008 and W10 install does not recognize the SAS Raid.  Is there a driver that is compatible with W10?

Thank you,

I have a number of R710 and R720 servers which I'd like to boot from SD card running VMware ESXI. Can you recommend SD cards which would run ESXi and would function in both server types.

PowerEdge 2900 with SAS 6/iR with server 2008 r2

server administrator alert there was a hard drive in pre failure condition.

Shut down the server, replaced the hard drive with a known good one. Turned on server, boot into windows, checked with server administrator and found the raid is in rebuild status.

two weeks later, started server administrator again and found the raid status was still in rebuild status with 0% complete.

I replaced a failed drive with a WD drive. I get event id 2359 "not supplied by an authorized hardware publisher".

This drive is set up to be a global hot spare, but I am worried that it will not work when the time of need comes. How do I know what drives are certified by Dell? Only those purchased from Dell?