Hi all, I recently put together a machine with 16 Hitachi 4TB disks.
They are model HDS5C4040ALE630 with firmware version MPAOA250 as reported by smartctl. They are connected to an LSI 9201-16i controller through "dumb" 6G backplanes in a Chenbro RM414 chassis (the backplanes don't act as an expander). These backplane have activity LEDs and fault LEDs. The fault LEDs usually only work with real hardware RAID controllers, but my experience up until now was that the activity LEDs always worked, even with basic SAS controllers, regardless of the type of disk. For whatever reason, these drives do not even light up the activity LEDs on these backplanes normally. When the most convienent method to locate a disk in a tray is by dd'ing and checking activity lights, since the WWN names are so long and convoluted, not having activity lights is pretty inconvienent. For now I have pieced together a script that uses smartctl and sasircu (lsi tool) to determine what slot a disk is in, but I'd rather not rely on this if possible. Anyway, I believe the problem is fundamentally with the disk's firmware, and unrelated to illumos/solaris because I've only seen it happen with this model disk, and I've observed the same behavior with this disk/backplane combination with linux and an areca hardware raid controller. _However_, this is where it gets interesting. I've noticed that if I remove one of the disks and reinsert it while openindiana is booted up, from that point on the activity LED for that particular drive will work. So, it shows that while the default state for the drive is to be incompatible with showing activity on this backplane, something is able to make the drive do this correctly, if it is hotplugged with the system on. I don't know if this would be something in the firmware of the LSI card, or something openindiana is doing to initialize communication with the disk, but I thought there might be a way to simulate the disk being hotplugged, without physically removing and reinserting it. I looked through a lot of obscure options in lsiutil, but nothing seemed to help. As far as I can tell, there aren't many tools to communicate directly with a disk in solaris-like operating systems (things like hdparm in linux). I tried querying the disks with several options in smartctl, but to no avail. So, while this is only tangentally related to illumos, I thought someone here might have an idea on how to work around the issue within illumos, or a suggestion of a tool to query the disk directly, or some way to to instruct the mpt_sas driver to believe a disk has just been inserted so it goes through whatever initialization routine is typical in that case, since physically hotplugging seems to fix the issue. The system is currently running openindiana 151a4, by the way. Thanks, Chad Cantwell ------------------------------------------- illumos-discuss Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/182180/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/182180/21175430-2e6923be Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21175430&id_secret=21175430-6a77cda4 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
