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April 24th, 2025 20:51
PowerEdge R730 when drive fails, no error
We purchased two PowerEdge R730 Win Server 2016, drives are original Dell's, and one is behaving in a peculiar manner.
Started to have this issue last year where a drive failed, but it did not trigger disk fail so there's no error on DRAC, front light indicator is blue. However, the failing tray disk has two green lights lit up. The normal ones have one steady green, and one blinking green for activity.
We have two failed disks on the same server, again, no error lights, so no email notification and no warning. The disk caddy on the failing drives have two lights steady on, same symptoms as before.
I got a spare backup drive, so I replaced one. I pulled the other failed out of the slot. No error on the front, while DRAC console showing degraded.
Usually on my other R710, R720, R520 even back to the old PE 2950, if I pull a drive out that is in a virtual disk, I'd get orange light on.
Because the drives failed and no indication to the system, I believe the OS writes to the system normally, mainboard sends normal data regularly and the H730 keeps writing to the disk thinking all normal, all while the disk didn't actually write data. The system was sluggish until the bad drives were pulled out.
What do you guys think on this, is it the main board, or the PERC H730? I still have active basic support until June.
Is there a configuration that should be enabled for this? What do I say when I contact support because they're not seeing there's an issue other than volume degraded while I wait for a replacement drive, and the DRAC log shows nothing's wrong but they are not seeing this visually:
DELL-Joey C
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April 25th, 2025 01:16
Hi,
Usually, iDRAC will report the issue and the LED indicator will show indication of any activity or issue. Ref: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-us/poweredge-r730/r730_ompublication/hard-drive-indicator-codes?guid=guid-d913a428-0e1b-43be-b607-f2c86f21b2de&lang=en-us. If indicator LED 1 does not blink, it shows that the drive has no data writing. This can mean that either the drive has issues or it is not in an array.
Have you already contacted support and a replacement drive is enroute? But you are concerned that this issue might have deeper meaning? Have the support already done a iDRAC reset? Maybe the iDRAC is not communicating well with the PERC and not able to collect reports. Have you tried requesting for PERC log analysis to be checked by the support? Have you provided them TSR logs?
officeofresearch
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April 25th, 2025 18:02
Hi, yes the drive #1 and #2 are steady green. Typically when the disk is bad, it goes amber, but not on this server.
I did drac reset, but it's not showing error. It shows error on the volume degraded but not on anywhere else. I have not contacted support but I will today to send them the tsr logs.
The concern is that may be there's a mainboard or perc controller issue that is not showing on logs, which support will think everything is okay.
officeofresearch
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May 1st, 2025 18:00
I contacted Dell Support, they're only going to replace the drive.
Support level 2 team is not addressing the reason why the server is not throwing error when there's bad disk.
Unfortunately I think this is a lost cause.