Fw: IBM i Disk system statistics

I never received an "impending failure" message fron any of the dead drives.
They were all parity errors , displayed by a "critical system error" message and an entry in the
"work with problems" screen.

I have 10 parity sets running on the machine. When one parity set faults, I have been copying the data,
ending parity on the affected set, removing the drive , and restarting the parity set.
It's been working out OK so far.

I plan to do a survey of manufacture dates on the installed drives. Maybe that will show something.

I am well aware of the vintage of the hardware I have. The 810 is still on V5R4!

Were I to replace drives, I would be more inclined to go for compatable SSDs.
That is a fantasy though. These guys don't want to spend money right now.

I have to put a business case together to justify some consultant time to help me with the HMC issue I mentioned earlier.
That is just how it is here right now.

Armand

----- Original Message ----- From: "DrFranken" <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "Midrange Systems Technical Discussion" <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, November 27, 2018 23:59
Subject: Re: IBM i Disk system statistics

'Not Replacing' them is, um, 'fraught with peril' because when the second drive does in a Parity set, you're toast.

You do realize that a 525 is OLD and I did some math a while back that the drives in that thing have likely rotated over 1 BILLION times so things in there are getting tired. We ARE seeing those drives beginning to fail at higher rates simply due to age.

IBM i constantly is looking at disks and deciding if the number of errors is such that a drive will fail. If the numbers get to that point you will get 'impending DASD failure' messages in QSYSOPR meaning replacing the drive is a good idea.

I would suspect that those folks claiming that other servers are 'better' are not comparing to decade old equipment.

Also in case you're confused on dates, the i810 is even older than a 525! Those came out in 2003!

<vendor response>

If you are looking for replacement drives for the 525 I have MANY of them. 35, 70, and 140G and they are CHEAP.

</Vendor response>

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 11/27/2018 4:59 PM, Armand Borick wrote:

Hi Everyone!

I am the inheritor of a 9406-525 that we would like to use as a backup to our production 9406-810.

I have the system set up and running, but the disk drives keep throwing parity errors.

The new system has about 3TB of disk in the main LPAR, so I have been just pulling the bad drives out of the
array without replacing them.

My question is: Is there a way to display the error statistics for the drives in the array, so I can identify upcoming failures?

I ran the Surface Analysis about 2 weeks ago and it reported as OK.
This morning another unit reported a parity error.
That is the 4th to go bad since I brought up the system about 2 months ago.
(the array started out with 75 disks)

The system is just waiting right now, while I finish off some other projects.
The plan is to clone the applications and data, and use Journaling and remote data queues to
keep the data files up to date.

I am not inclined to load up all the files just to have the system start dropping drives.
I would like to identify the worst of the remaining drives, and remove them.
My production box only has 180GB on it, so there is plenty of room.

I am trying to pitch the i as a good platform for high availabliity, but its a tough sell with drives dropping dead left and right.

I have a bunch of Milleneals in management here who think Windows servers are the best thing, and IBM i is "legacy".

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Armand Borick

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