Re: Can a hard drive fix itself

Got busy this morning and forgot to follow up.

We pulled the "time out error" drive around 5pm last night. The SAN
immediately started the RAID 5 rebuild with the hot spare. Then we
inserted the cold spare and configured as the new hot spare.

The RAID 5 rebuild finished around 10:20pm at which time the SAN then
verified the hot spare. That concluded about midnight.

Today all is well except for needing to replace the cold spare.



On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 3:39 PM, Jeff Crosby <jlcrosby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

During save portion of backup. Prior to verify stage.


On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 3:36 PM, Chris Bipes <chris.bipes@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

Heal itself, NO. But a timeout is not necessarily a failure. Did this
happen during some sort of heavy IO like a backup? After the timeout, the
RAID controller may have initiated a rebuild and now the data is rebuilt
and the drive is OK. I would replace it just to be safe. If it erred
once, it will do so again, and at the worst time, after another drive fails.

--
Chris Bipes
Director of Information Services
CrossCheck, Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:pctech-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Jeff Crosby
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2014 12:32 PM
To: PC Technical Discussion for iSeries Users
Subject: [PCTECH] Can a hard drive fix itself

Cybernetics SAN, 8 500gb drives, RAID 5 w/hot spare. Drives are
S.M.A.R.T.
Hosting 5 virtual servers.

At 3:20 this morning I got a text of a drive issue: "ERROR - Drive
timeout
detected: port=5"

Talked to the hardware guy at that time. He checked in and said the RAID
5
was still functioning and the hot spare was still available. Suggested we
wait till business hours since there was a hot spare.

Around 9am we decided we would do the replacement around 4:30pm since
things would be a lot less busy for the RAID 5 rebuild. The RAID 5 was
still functioning and if one didn't drill down in all the way, you
wouldn't
even see the status DEVICE ERROR on that drive.

I checked it out about an hour ago and the DEVICE ERROR is gone, replaced
by OK which is what it should say. Hardware guy says he has seen this
before simply by reseating the "problem" drive.

But we did no such thing. Haven't touched it at all. Hardware guy
suggests waiting a day and see what happens.

Anybody seen this before? A drive heals itself?

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--
Jeff Crosby
VP Information Systems
UniPro FoodService/Dilgard
P.O. Box 13369
Ft. Wayne, IN 46868-3369
260-422-7531
www.dilgardfoods.com

The opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily the opinion of my
company. Unless I say so.