Promise RAID Critical

P

PhantmShado

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 17, 2009
Messages
355
Hi Guys,
My promise fasttrak tx4650 started reporting something wrong with my hardware at boot and when I log into the web manager after boot it alerts me that my RAID volume is critical. However, all 4 drives in the RAID are reported as Functional by that same software.

If I try to access data from the RAID it accesses, but very slowly. In the past when I lost a drive I could still access data at same speed, I just knew to get stuff the hell off, so this behavior seems odd in more than one way to me. The only inconsistency I could see is one of the drives says that SMART is disabled, which I have never touched, and I can't see how I could have toggled that either.

So I'm wondering if there people in this forum have tips on what I could be doing next to identify the failure point. Any pointer would be appreciated.

Thanks.
 
Do you have a full backup of your data; i.e. is the data itself in jeopardy?
 
I do have a full backup, which is also in RAID 5.

Also, the point is moot. The raid software dropped the one it was saying had smart disabled. So there's another seagate to send back. Which makes three in two years of running this 4 drive array. That's an awful failure rate. So done with this company.
 
I have a client that hand a bunch of Promise stuff, but they kept having weird issues, and ended up getting rid of everything and starting over.

They became known as "Broken Promises" around the office.

I would probably get a new controller that is compatible with some new drives and restore the data from backup to the new array. Verify it and then dump the old stuff.
 
PhantmShado said:
Also, the point is moot. The raid software dropped the one it was saying had smart disabled. So there's another seagate to send back. Which makes three in two years of running this 4 drive array. That's an awful failure rate. So done with this company.
Click to expand...
The fact that disks are dropped from the RAID does not mean there is anything wrong with the harddrive. It most likely means the RAID controller is extremely sensitive and will forcefully disconnect disks which do not reply in time, for example if they have a pending sector (Current Pending Sector in SMART output). Those are not failed disks, just a disk with small unreadable damaged 512-bytes sectors.

If your RAID controller cannot handle those, and your disks are not expensive RAID edition harddrives, then they might easily become detached/failed/free to the RAID controller and your array will fail.

If you want reliable RAID and storage i can highly recommend you to have a look at ZFS.
 
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