Help Needed - How to Test a RAID6 Array...

[vorpel]

Hello. I picked up an Areca-1680IX 24-4 port raid card, and 6 of the new Seagate 4TB NAS drives (ST4000VN000). I am planning to setup a Raid6 array with the 6 drives for now, and when I know it is stable I will add more drives.

My question is - once I have the array setup and running, how can I test it for error timeouts, SMART errors, etc?

I am trying to avoid having to purchase enterprise class drives, and with the new NAS drives from both WD and Seagate I think they will be the solution, but I don't want to commit data to his array until I know that it won't have issues like the normal consumer grade drives do in hardware Raid setups (tler errors - drives getting kicked out of the array, etc).

Are there any tools that can help simulate these types of errors to see how the NAS drives in the array behave?

Any help or pointers are welcome!

Thanks!!!

-DC

 

[drescherjm]

The first thing I do is put GBs of unimportant test data on the array. Get the md5 sum of the data. Then hot pull a drive and see how recovery works. Then try that with 2 drives and finally do that with 3 drives and see if how controller handles the recovery when you put 1 back.

 

[vorpel]

Excellent idea - thanks!

 

[osrk]

Yes a good idea is to fill the hard drives and then run a patrol read too. Once I started filling up my array hardcore I started to get drives that had bad sectors or were dieing.