Eli Morris put forth on 10/31/2010 2:56 PM: > OK, that's a long tale of woe. Thanks for any advise. In additional to the suggestions you've already received, I'd suggest you reach out to your colleagues at SDSC. They'd most certainly have quite a bit of storage experience on staff, and they are part of the University of California system, and thus "family" of sorts. The Janus 6640 has 4 rows of 4 hot swap drives connected to a backplane. Of the 4 drives that were marked offline, are they all in the same horizontal row or vertical column? If so, I'd say you most certainly have a defective SATA backplane. Even if the offline drives are not in a physical row, the problem could still likely be the backplane. This is _very_ common with "low end" or low cost SATA arrays. Backplanes issues are the most common cause of drives being kicked offline unexpectedly. The very first thing I would do, given the _value_ of the data itself, is get an emergency onsite qualified service tech from your vendor or the manufacturer and have the backplane or the entire unit itself replaced. If replacing the entire unit, swap all of the 16 drives into the new unit _inserting each drive in the same slot number as the old unit_ Have the firmware/nvram configuration dumped from the old unit to the new one so the RAID configuration is carried over as well as the same firmware rev you were using. After this is complete, power up the array and manually put all of the drives online and get a healthy status in the LCD display. Mount the filesystem read only and do some serious read stress tests to make sure drives aren't kicked offline again. If they are kicked offline, note the drive slot numbers to see if the same set of 4 drives are kicked offline. At this point, either the backplane design is faulty, or the 4 drives being kicked offline have a firmware rev different enough from the other drives, or simply faulty for your RAID application, that the RAID controller simply doesn't like them. If this is the case, you need to take an inventory of the firmware revision on each and every one of the 2TB drives. Of those not being kicked offline, note the highest quantity of identical firmware. Contact Western Digital support via phone. Briefly but thoroughly explain who you are, what your situation is, and the gravity of the situation. Ask them what their opinion is on the firmware issue, and what rev you should download for use in flashing the entire set of drives. Mismatched drive firmware across a set of drives assigned to a RAID array, especially a hardware RAID array, is the second most common cause of drives being kicked offline unexpectedly. Linux mdraid is slightly more tolerant of mismatched firmware, but it's always best practice to use only drives of matched firmware rev within a given RAID group. This has been true for a couple of decades now (or more). Hope this helps. Good luck. We're pulling for you. -- Stan _______________________________________________ xfs mailing list xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx http://oss.sgi.com/mailman/listinfo/xfs
