Dell H700 RAID controller configureation

I just discovered something fun with one of my RAID arrays. I have a 12-drive RAID 10 array using a Dell C2100 and a H700 RAID controller. I just lost a drive in the array, and I can't find a way to figure out which one failed.

I have Dell OpenManage installed, which is telling me that the failed drive is in the 12th slot. When I arrived at the datacenter, I found every drive has a red flashing LED on it. With the Areca RAID cards, only the failed drive flashes red, so its easy to locate. I issued a command to flash the LED of the bay that OpenManage indicated had failed, and nothing happened. I tried issuing the command to make it stop flashing, still no luck. This feature worked fine when the array was healthy, but apaprently does not work when the array is indicating a drive failure.

Does anyone have any experience with this controller or Dell OpenManage? There must be a setting somewhere to either acknowledge the failure, so I can flash the LED on the failed drive, or change the default behavior so it doesn't flash all the LEDs. I can't imagine this would ever be a desired behavior.

EDIT: I found the drive bay numbering scheme in the hardware owner's manual, so i'm all set on that. I'd still like to know if there is a way to change the behavior of the LEDs though. For future reference, the drives are numbered bottom to top, right to left. So the bottom right drive is 0, and the top left one is 11.

..or you can just look at the HDD(s) serial?
//Danne

diizzy said:

..or you can just look at the HDD(s) serial?
//Danne

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I can't read the serial numbers without pulling the drive out of the bay. If I pull two drives from the same mirror pool, then the whole array goes down.

Under the virtual disk in question in open manage it should give you a list of the drives it has in it. Under the tasks for the drives you should be able to blink the lights on the front of the hotswap slot in question.

swatbat said:

Under the virtual disk in question in open manage it should give you a list of the drives it has in it. Under the tasks for the drives you should be able to blink the lights on the front of the hotswap slot in question.

Click to expand...

Yep, and apparently that doesn't work when a drive has failed, since all the lights in the array are already flashing.

wizdum said:

Yep, and apparently that doesn't work when a drive has failed, since all the lights in the array are already flashing.

Click to expand...

I've never had that problem with that controller although I haven't used it in that model of server. If you want to make sure you pull the right drive get the serial and then power off the system. That way if you manage to pull the wrong drive it will not kill the array.

I see you got it figured out, I'm curious, did all the lights stop flashing once you'd replaced the failed drive?

That's really weird, might be worth checking the H700 firmware or maybe the backplane firmware?. A drive failed in an array on our R510 with an H700 card a few months back, and it worked like you would expect. Only the failed drive had a flashing LED. It also started flashing the predictive failure sequence on the single drive a few days before it failed.

I know it will flash all the drives if it's in the middle of an array rebuild, but that should be the green LEDs, not the orange/red failure ones.

I have read that the H700 will flash the failure light for drives it doesn't recognize, like if you toss in some regular consumer SSDs or similar. Sounds like maybe the card glitched and thought everything was an unsupported drive or something like that.

JBark said:

I see you got it figured out, I'm curious, did all the lights stop flashing once you'd replaced the failed drive?

That's really weird, might be worth checking the H700 firmware or maybe the backplane firmware?. A drive failed in an array on our R510 with an H700 card a few months back, and it worked like you would expect. Only the failed drive had a flashing LED. It also started flashing the predictive failure sequence on the single drive a few days before it failed.

I know it will flash all the drives if it's in the middle of an array rebuild, but that should be the green LEDs, not the orange/red failure ones.

I have read that the H700 will flash the failure light for drives it doesn't recognize, like if you toss in some regular consumer SSDs or similar. Sounds like maybe the card glitched and thought everything was an unsupported drive or something like that.

Click to expand...

The LEDs stayed on after I replaced the drive, but turned off once the array status went back to normal. The same thing happens on another array that I have (same server and RAID card). If I pull a drive, or the array status changes to "degraded" all the LEDs light up. I do get green LEDs on the two drives that are involved in the rebuilding process, and green LEDs from normal disk use.

Dell OpenManage is indicating that there is a firmware update available. I had been ignoring it under the premise that "if its not broke don't fix it", but it looks like it may be broke. How safe is the firmware update process?

This is an eBay server, so its possible that it may have some custom firmware installed on it.