Hard disk numbering on PowerEdge VRTX shared storage

Question

I found a funny problem on a PowerEdge VRTX.... This is a used system, we got from a customer and now we want to use it in our workshop. So I started by erasing all customer data and reconfiguring the shared storage.

During this process, drive 0:8 (of 25) got a predictive error and a warning in the GUI. So I took drive 8 out of the box, but the error remained. I also took four more drives out to move them into the blades as boot drives (you can't boot from shared storage...) but those drives also remained in the physical disk list.

A bit later I saw that drives from the middle of the list were gone???

So I found this: The disk drives have the slot number stored on the drive. If you move a drive physically, it keeps it's "slot" number and is reported with that number in the drive list. It turned out that my faulty drive "slot 8" was actually in slot 13.

Question: How can I erase the stored slot number? Or how can I reformat the entire storage to put the physical slot number onto the disk?
It is pretty annoying when you don't know where your drives are...

Dell-Martin S · Answer

Hi,

this information should be stored on the DDF, to reset this information like clearing foreign config or delete/clear and recreate/reinitialize Disk.

You could delete and get back to the foreign configuration when you delete raid and create a new volume with and do a slow initialization of a new raid volume.

There are many solutions online on how to do this when you search for your RAIDcontroller that you have installed.

Did you have any further questions?

Supercap · Answer

Hello Martin

I erased all user data by deleting the existing config, creating a new virtual disk and performing a slow init. But it did not change the drive address.

There was also NO foreign configuration to choose or to erase.
Everything worked fine including assigning of the VDisks to the blades. But physical drives kept the stored slot number.

To solve the problem temporarily, I installed all drives in the slots that correspond to the stored value. But now my setup looks weird because I have empty slots all over the place. (only 20 of 25 drives are installed)

Dell-Martin S · Answer

Hi,

I spoke to a colleague he told me that only clearing DDF could fix the failure and he is wondering too why the provided steps did not help.

I am sorry that I could not assist you to solve this problem.

Did you have any further questions?

Regards Martin

Supercap · Answer

What exactly does DDF mean?

Next step will be to erase all disk drives in another system with an erase tool. Hopefully this will clear all old data.
I also noticed that the enclosure now reports all disks as "failed" even if the RAID is working fine. I only got a yellow light on the frontpanel and an error report in the GUI. But physical disks are reported OK. This happened after re-arranging the disks to the correct slot numbers as indicated in the GUI.

I must say this is a pretty strange product

Dell-Martin S · Answer

Hi,

Common RAID Disk Data Format (DDF)

The Common RAID Disk Data Format specification defines a standard data structure describing how data is formatted across the disks in a RAID group. The Disk Data Format (DDF) structure allows a basic level of interoperability between different suppliers of RAID technology. The Common RAID DDF structure benefits storage users by enabling data-in-place migration among systems from different vendors.

Regards Martin

PowerEdge Hardware General

Hard disk numbering on PowerEdge VRTX shared storage

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