i have spoken to EMC and they advised me to do an upgrade from Release 2.19.300.5.019 (currently running) to Release 02.19.300.5.040 as CX300 to deal with ATA drives in a better way.

when it is done, i will inform you for the results.

hi again, i have run the navicli command on both SPs and the state of the disk was Unbound. it didn't give neither ENA nor PUP.

have you opened a Service Request with EMC for this issue? i have a feeling that running zerodisk on the unbound atas might clear your problem but without having analyzed spcollects i'd not do that. i am sure EMC is interested in finding the root cause here as well.

yes i have done, EMC adviced me to do an upgrade for the FLARE code after sending them the spcollects. still waiting for the customer to specify a date to do that because as you know, i have to the upgrade while the array is online.

what didi you mean by running the zerodisk on the unbound ATA.

it is an engineering level command and it does exactly what it says, writes 0s to all sectors on the disk. the disk has to be unbound, otherwise FLARE rejects the command. i'm afraid it is not allowed to give out the details for this command here but i guess you could ask your EMC CE to run it for you. still, without knowing the root cause of your problem, i'd not use it and follow the CS suggestions.

If you really wanted to use the command you could look in the knowledgebase. There is a support solution that gives the command, but I would warn that the command is DANGEROUS and you must be very careful not to zero disks containing data.

However I believe that unbinding and then rebinding performs the same function. This is explained in emc143057.

The situation I would consider this most useful is for array decommissioning. Some companies, like mine, require that no data walks out the door.