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ATTO / Proavio Raid Trouble
Hi There
Firstly a few disclaimers: 1) I couldn’t find a forum for raid storage so I guessed this would be the closest thing, 2) I am an experienced, trained engineer and operator and have been installing and looking after edit suites for many years and 3) If I have made a dodgy purchasing decision then I am sorry but would appreciate some help.
My problem is: I have a Symphony on a MacPro with a Raid 5 setup consisting of an ATTO R380, Proavio EB8MS and 8 x 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black drives. All was working well and the box could do 500MB/sec which is great.
However, last night Symphony crashed and when I shut down the Mac, it took ages and had a grey screen with a spinning wheel (not the beachball, the grey shut down one). After some time I thought that the mac must have crapped up so I held the power button in to turn it off.
When I booted up again, the Raid said it was offline and looking in the ATTO config tool revealed that 7 of the 8 drives are degraded. I guess this can’t mean that 7 drives have died but that the Raid group is broken.
the million dollar question is whether there is anything I can do? Also, could I have busted it myself by forcing the power off? If so, does that mean that “protected” storage is not so protected in the event of power failure?
Any help would be most appreciated.
Dave Austin
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2 Replies
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so the grey screen… I will take that as a kernel panic. It is where your screen is washed over with a “grey” color and tells you to shut down the machine. In my experiences this has occurred mainly because of a hardware conflict. This can be many things, sometimes RAM, sometimes a failing motherboard, but mostly it has always been a failing/failed PCI card.
The direct attached solution is great until there is a problem. You might have RAID safety for failing drives, but you don’t have redundant controllers. You are at the mercy of that lone ATTO card. If the card has a catastrophic failure you might have a serious issue. I would call ATTO immediately to see if you can get the drives back online. Only if you have Seagate 1.5TB drives from a year ago could you have 7/8 true failures.
-jw
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response on 11/21/09
Hi David –
I hate to do this, because I firmly believe that info like this should be public information, but please email me privately atand I will try to give you a CLI command to make your drive array come back to life.
The ATTO R380 card is great. This will be a lesson in proper practices. People that think that power protection is not that important. People think that catistrophic failure can’t happen to them if they have a RAID 5 array. Disk drive technlogy sucks compared to videotape, but I face reality, and the way the world does business today.
I will look for your email.
Bob Zelin
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