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42751
July 6th, 2008 14:00
How do I read SMART attributes of a disk behind a RAID controller?
Hi all,
I have a PE 1855 blade server with two Seagate disks in RAID-1 configuration (via PERC 4/im). I would like to read SMART attributes of the disks (such as reallocated sectors count), as only a few of them are used by OMSA. However, none of the tools I know (smartmontools, hdd health, DataLifeguard) can see "behind" the cotroller, so only a virtual disk with no SMART attributes is reported by them. So far, the only solution I see is to remove the disk from the bay, plug it into another computer, read the attributes, then put it back to the bay and rebuild the RAID. I am sure there must be some easier way of doing it - any tips?
TIA,
Jim
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david.j.wood
145 Posts
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July 6th, 2008 20:00
It depends on the controller - with a PERC 5 or PERC 6 and suitable drivers you can enable 'passthrough' support - my experience of doing this is with FreeBSD 7 and a PERC 6. However, it only works with SAS drives.
I'm not sure what the situation is with the PERC 4 - maybe someone else can answer. It would be useful to know what OS you are running on your blade.
The other thing to be aware of is that SMART is rather different on SCSI and SAS drives than on IDE and SATA drives. Your blade will have SCSI drives.
The IDE and SATA drives have lots of SMART counters, whilst SCSI and SAS drives have rather fewer. For example, here's the SMART status of one of the SAS drives in a 2950 III that is behind a PERC 6/i:
smartctl version 5.38 [amd64-portbld-freebsd7.0] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
Device: SEAGATE ST3300655SS Version: S527
Serial number: 3LM3YT98
Device type: <31>
Transport protocol: SAS
Local Time is: Sun Jul 6 22:16:09 2008 BST
Device supports SMART and is Enabled
Temperature Warning Disabled or Not Supported
SMART Health Status: OK
Current Drive Temperature: 32 C
Drive Trip Temperature: 68 C
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: 10700420 93 0 10700513 10700513 1042.652 0
write: 0 0 1 1 1 346.539 0
verify: 19580151 0 0 19580151 19580151 2672.676 0
Non-medium error count: 21
SMART Self-test log
Num Test Status segment LifeTime LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ]
Description number (hours)
# 1 Background long Completed - 46 - [- - -]
# 2 Background long Completed - 1 - [- - -]
# 3 Background short Completed - 0 - [- - -]
Long (extended) Self Test duration: 2800 seconds [46.7 minutes]
As you can see, there aren't the various counters you are used to seeing in SMART utilities for IDE and SATA drives. Maybe OMSA is already showing you everything there is to show.
I have heard it argued - and I'm inclined to agree - that the SCSI and SAS variant of SMART is actually more logical and user friendly. It just doesn't have the same 'nerd factor' as all those numbers from an IDE or SATA drive.
jim.bim
2 Posts
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July 7th, 2008 08:00