UPDATE: RAID5 and 3 (or 4) disks
July 4th, 2008 by TheBonsai
m00!
This week I finally bought 4 new 500GB harddisks to be used with my Escalade 8506-12. The Installation wasn’t a big deal - simple plug&play. Created the array… surprise! The array initialization stopped after about 5 minutes with tons of
Jul 1 17:12:00 gate kernel: 3w-xxxx: scsi3: AEN: ERROR: Drive error: Port #1. Jul 1 17:12:00 gate kernel: 3w-xxxx: scsi3: AEN: WARNING: Sector repair occurred: Port #1.
in my syslog files.
I hoped the controller was okay when I swapped the drives on ports #1 and #0… and yes:
Jul 1 17:35:58 gate kernel: 3w-xxxx: scsi3: AEN: INFO: Initialization started: Unit #0. Jul 1 17:37:54 gate kernel: 3w-xxxx: scsi3: AEN: ERROR: Drive error: Port #0.
Strike, it’s “just” a failing drive, not the controller! I got the S.M.A.R.T. errorlogs from the drive in question and was surprised: The first (power-on selftest) errors were logged immediately after the very first power-on - at lifetime zero! That drive was delivered broken!
Background:
These are not normal drives, this is the RAID edition, which is more expensive. Drives can fail, not a big deal, but I wouldn’t expect a failure at lifetime zero. Next time, I will buy Seagate drives again - it was the first time I tried something from Western Digital (for such a usecase), and immediately 25% of the drives were broken. Either I had luck for now, or Seagate’s drives are better (for the same/similar price!).
My Problem for now is, I can’t start initializing the array until I get the spare drive. 3 HDDs for that planned RAID5 is too less capacity and too less performance. So… waiting.
Sidenote:
On one reboot, the device name for the logical drives on that box swapped, before I had:
- SDA: USB disk with my favourite Star Trek Voyager sequences
- SDB: Logical drive of the Escalade controller
As I said, they were swapped after a reboot. I continued my performance tests and wondered why there’s only 20MB/s throughput on SDB (compared to 80MB/s before the reboot)… After writing some gigabytes of random data I finally realized that I destroyed the payload on my USB drive - ARGH!
Conclusions:
- I’ll buy Seagate again
- if you have important data, keep it away from me
Have a nice day!
UPDATE-01:
Since the mentioned drive was broken, I brought it back. After 2 days I called ‘em and asked about it. Answer: “I plugged it in, it works here.” HELL! He didn’t even know what a S.M.A.R.T.-log was… But I was able to convince him to order a new one, finally…
UPDATE-02:
The new disk arrived - the array is complete. Initialising now.
UPDATE-03:
After about 100 days of operation, the second disk begins to fail. Hell! I never saw such an amount of failures with Seagate! Hard disks can fail, yes. But this is a loss of 50% within 100 days…
Additiponal complexity: I removed another hard drive for case maintenace (fan was broken), and the broken drive first showed up when I did an array rebuild - I can’t rebuild now 
I won’t get yet another WD spare disk, I’m fed up. I’ll go with Seagate, I should have done that before…
This entry was posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 6:15 am and is filed under Hobby, Linux, english. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
August 22nd, 2008 at 9:11 am
That’s the problem with corner shops. Immediate availibitly (maybe), and little expertise. I know these dealers in general, and I know your dealer, and so I know what you are telling between the lines.