Hard DRive Light Constant Activity

Thank you. I will try both of your suggestions and post the results.

The Patrol Read utility could very well be causing this.  I suggest stopping this application from running and see if you still have the constant activity.

 

The best Dell utility I have seen so far for checking drives for errors is Dell PowerEdge Diagnostics.  ftp://ftp.dell.com/diags/dell-pediags-win32-2.7.0.193-A01.exe  You can test the entire system or by device.  To test just the controller and drives, locate them and place a check mark by them. Towards the bottom of the page on the  "Tests Selected" view, you can select "Quick Tests" and also the number of passes.  If you are concered about drive integrity, this is a great tool.

It was Patrol Read!

 

I downloaded the MegaPR utility from Dell that allows start/stop of Patrol Read from the Command Prompt. Stopping it instantly eliminates the hard drive light activity.

 

Do you feel as if this is an important function that should be left on?

 

Thanks for your suggestions,

 

Jim

Hi,

 

  Patrol read is a feature that identifies and remaps bad sectors on a continual basis, hence reducing the chances of having a double fault condition if one of your drives go offline.

 ( A double fault will cause file corruption, which may be a don't care on a temp file up to a down system if it happens on a critical O/S file. New F/W versions on the system 2 Perc controllers will now allow you to rebuild with a double fault condition, reporting it rebuilt with errors, previously you would end up having to delete and recreae the container, restoring the files from your backup.)

Thank you for that information, Gary.