SMART monitoring RAID 5 array? (Also staggered spin-up?)

[Discostu2120]

I'm running a dual xeon server on a Tyan Tiger i7501R with 2 Highpoint 1820a RAID cards connected to 8x250gb WD2500's and 8x400gb Seagate 7200.8's. Both arrays are RAID 5. I want to be able to monitor the SMART status of the drives through the Highpoint card, but so far no utilities I've tried detect the drives.

Also, I've seen no mention of the Highpoint 1820a supporting staggered spin-up of the drives, is there anyway to do this with software? I have all this running on the most powerful PSU I could find (PC Power and Cooling Turbo Cool 850), but 17 HD's spinning up is still an enormous load.

[DougLite]

That PSU will be fine, even under spinup. With a +12 rail for each array, each drive will have 2A on +12. Given that PCP&C units are rated at 50C, they'll be fine.

As for the SMART data, you'll need to find something compatible with the HP controller. I wish you luck. Have you tried HP's RAID management utility?

[Discostu2120]

yeah no SMART monitoring in the Highpoint raid monitoring software

[DougLite]

IIRC, the HighPoint software will spit out a warning at you if it detects any out of spec SMART data that may lead to failure. Doesn't help you with preventative maintanence though :(

[unhappy_mage]

I'm running a dual xeon server on a Tyan Tiger i7501R with 2 Highpoint 1820a RAID cards connected to 8x250gb WD2500's and 8x400gb Seagate 7200.8's. Both arrays are RAID 5.
You lucky $*&^#.... ;)

Are you stuck with Windows for the OS or is Linux an option? If you can boot a livecd (knoppix et al) you can see if smartmontools (http://sourceforge.net/projects/smartmontools/) works for you.

http://www.hardfolding.com/ftag1.php/mem/153.png (http://www.hardfolding.com?go=38&id=153)

[tdg]

The RAID card should let you know if SMART values are out of line, I have never seen anything that will go around the controller since by design the card takes care of all the drives and any related warnings.

As for staggered spin-up, thats also card dependent. Software likely can't even do this, and even if it could it would require your already booted to the OS. I'm not sure many ATA drives can even be delayed to do this anyway, since most will spin up as soon as power is applied, unlike SCSI that can be configured to start when it receives the command from the controller.

[Discostu2120]

As long as the highpoint card will report any SMART errors thorugh the management utility thats fine with me. I don't need to know all the technical data as long as it is functioning.

It makes sense that staggered spin up is a hardware only based thing. Highpoint doesn't mention staggered startup anywhere in the 1820a documentation, so I guess I'm out of luck. I'm adding the seagates and second highpoint card sometime today, so we'll see if the turbo cool 850 can handle 17 hard drives spinning up all at once.