PowerEdge: Seagate Summit SAS or SATA Drives Report Medium Errors or Sense Key 3/11 Read Errors

Dell PowerEdge and PowerVault systems with Seagate Summit drives report sense key 03/11 and medium errors. Drives with excessive read errors may also report a predictive failure or SMART alert.

Dell Engineering has identified a firmware issue that can result in weak writes to a drive sector. Subsequent reads in this sector report a sense key 3/11 or a medium error as the initial write was not completed correctly.

Update Seagate Summit SAS and SATA hard drive firmware at the earliest available opportunity to avoid impact to data.

• The firmware versions in which this issue is resolved are listed below:

These features are not available on system configurations where the operating system (OS) has direct access to drives through an HBA. Industry-standard OS utilities should be used instead to verify data integrity.

Patrol Read:
The Patrol read feature is designed as a preventative measure to ensure physical disk health and data integrity. Patrol read scans and resolves potential problems on configured physical disks.

The Dell OpenManage Storage Management application can be used to start patrol-read and change its behavior.

Some properties of the patrol-read feature are:

• Runs on all disks on the controller that are configured as part of a virtual disk, including hot-spares
• The Patrol read feature does not run on physical disks that are not part of non-RAID disks, virtual disks, or drives that are in Ready state.
• The amount of controller resources dedicated to patrol read operations adjusts based on the number of outstanding disk I/O operations. For example, if the system is processing a large number of I/O operations, then patrol read uses fewer resources to allow the I/O to take a higher priority.
• Patrol read does not run on disks that are involved in any of the following operations:
  • Rebuild
  • Replace member
  • Full or background initialization
  • Consistency Check
  • Online capacity expansion (OCE)

Consistency Check:
Consistency Check (CC) is a background operation that verifies and corrects the mirror or parity data for fault tolerant virtual disks. It is recommended that you periodically run a consistency check on virtual disks. You can manually start a CC using the HII Configuration Utility or the PERC CLI application.

CC and BGI both correct parity errors, however, CC reports data inconsistencies through an event notification, while BGI does not. You can start CC manually, but not BGI.

Background Initialization:
Background Initialization (BGI) is an automated process that writes parity or mirror data on newly created virtual disks. BGI does not run on RAID 0 virtual disks. You can control the BGI rate in the HII application. Any change to the BGI rate does not take effect until the next BGI operation is started.

• If you cancel BGI, it automatically restarts within five minutes.
• Unlike full or fast initialization of virtual disks, background initialization does not clear data from the physical disks.
• Consistency Check, and BGI typically cause some loss in performance until the operation completes.