[plug] IBM ServeRAID (was: Help request)

[Craig Ringer]

On Thu, 2004-03-11 at 09:27, Denis Brown wrote:

> There have been some discussions on this list over time, talking about RAID 
> controllers that hide incipient failures at the native drive 
> level.   Perhaps it was Craig (Ringer) who told of a swag of new drives 
> that failed without the controller bothering to tell of the fun and games, 
> until it was too late.   So this might be an opportune time to start a 
> thread about how to discover native drive status in the context of a 
> (hardware) RAID setup?

Depends on the controller. The 3ware controllers have special ioctls to
pass through raw ATA/ATAPI commands, and those are used by smartctl to
query disk status. Some other controllers (mostly SCSI) present the RAID
volume as LUN 0, with LUN 1 ... n being the physical disks; this allows
direct access to and testing of the physical disks. Some offer disk
status reporting via custom software tools or via the management
interface.

Many cheap RAID controllers (esp. hardware-assisted software RAID) don't
seem to offer any such facilities. Get a decent one instead ;-)

I posted a bit of info a while ago for 3ware card users.

Craig Ringer