[CentOS] LSI MegaRAID experience...

Miranda Hawarden-Ogata hawarden at ifa.hawaii.edu
Thu Jul 18 23:11:27 UTC 2013


On 2013/07/18 05:57 AM, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
> John Doe wrote:
>> anyone using an LSI MegaRAID experienced "disappearing drives"...?
>> We installed 6 new C6 servers, each with a Supermicro SMC2108 (LSI
>> MegaRAID) controllers and 3 PX-128M5Pro SSDs ( RAID1 + hostswap).
>> 2 weeks (and almost no activity on it, since not in production, apart from
>> installation) later, megacli sees (based on the slot numbers):
>> - on one server: only the 2nd disk of the RAID + the ex-hotswap brought
>> online. NO sign of the first disk, no error message, it just
>> "disapeared"...
>> - on another server: apparently lost 1 of the 2 RAID1 disks and then the
>> second disk of the RAID1...  Now I can only see the spare brought online,
>> so lonely...
>> Is it "normal" for megacli to "hide" failed disks?
>> Controller's firmware is the latest.
>> SSDs's firmware are not... will try to flash them.
>> BTW, any tips to flash them through the RAID controller instead of having
>> to remove them all and connect them to a SATA controller...?
>> This is a bit scary...
> You're saying that if you use megacli, it doesn't show the physical drive?
>
> As someone else said, I'd look at the SM box: I have *nothing* but very
> bad experience with SM's quality control (try sending 4? 5? 6? boxes out
> of 20 back for repair from Penguin, a vendor that's all SM).
>
>           mark "that doesn't count the couple or so sent back *twice*"
>
We run 3 centos6+MR9286-8e systems and we've always been able to see the 
drives via cli. The only time a system didn't report drives was one of 
the cards had the metal bracket be a little bit not straight such that 
if you screwed down the bracket, the back of the card lifted a bit. When 
moving the box, it jolted that card enough that upon boot the 
motherboard no longer saw the card at all and of course not the drives 
hanging off it either... straightening the bracket fixed that problem. 
We've seen this problem two or three times out of the 8 or so cards 
we've had (the original configuration used more cards than the current 
one, four cards are so much cheaper than 8! =P)

Now, we've tested the systems heavily, "killing" drives, changing things 
around, etc, and never had a drive vanish unless it was pulled out of 
the connector, so, no, megacli does not hide dead drives.

Thanks!
Miranda





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