-
Sonnet Raid D800 – have I set this right?
-
I checked the details of recommended 1TB drives (the standard Sonnet “Sonnet has qualified and recommends the following hard drives” blurb) at the time on the online retailers website.
As they don’t stock the D800 anymore, I can’t recall which 1TB drives were mentioned in the Sonnet ‘blurb’ I saw.
They currently stock the Fusion R800. Only one 1TB drive is mentioned as a recommended drive (apparently copied and pasted Sonnet blurb again) – the 1TB Hitachi Ultrastar A7K1000, model #HUA721010KLA330.
This ‘recommended’ 1TB Hitachi drive can be found nowhere on their website – not out of stock or unavailable, it doesn’t exist.
The D800 was not offered by them ‘complete’ for me at the time with 8 recommended hard drives.
I eventually bought my hollow D800 enclosure from this particular retailer as they were the least expensive.
I received a quote from another online retailer at the time for a D800 ‘complete’ with Seagate drives in their quote.
This led me to check the Sonnet website to see if the Seagate drives were compatible because they seemed a pretty reasonable price individually.
I went to the Sonnet website and noticed the Seagate drive was mentioned as being compatible “Seagate Barracuda ES.2, # ST31000340NS(4)” and didn’t see anything there to say that the Seagate drives weren’t up to scratch, apart from the ‘ensure you have firmware SN06’
I thought, happy days, because the price seemed reasonable and the drive was compatible, so armed with that info. (totally unaware that the Seagate drives aren’t as good as the others) I bought the drives separately from another online retailer.
I should have posted my intended D800 and drives specs on here before I made the leap. Kicking myself – I usually do expose my intended purchases for criticism on forums before proceeding!
I thought I’d done my research pretty okay, but it’s not until you share your specs with other users and hear their experiences that you get to know how the equipment really fares!
Oh well, if I win the lottery or scoop another project I’ll check out those Hitachi Drives. I’ll keep you posted on the Seagate firmware SN06 drives nonetheless as I continue to use them in the D800.
Peter Dunphy
2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5
-
I turned on SMART monitoring yesterday and I just received two error messages for a new disk which is brand new that I used 2 days ago to replace a drive that had been flagged up by my D800 as faulty, but then strangely became ‘Ok’ again the following day.
I’m not sure how SMART monitoring works but no doubt if it’s flashing up messages there’s bound to be some kind of problem.
The messages are:
An ExpressSAS event has occurred:
Firmware message: “Disk [9QJ4TDR1] SMART attribute 195 worst is now 36”
At the exact same time another message popped up:
An ExpressSAS event has occurred:
Firmware message: “Disk [9QJ4TDR1] SMART attribute 195 worst is now 72”
The hard drive location is at the very bottom of the D800.
What do you think guys? Could this be a problem in that bottom part of my D800 enclosure?
Have emailed Sonnet in the meantime and will post my findings.
Peter Dunphy
2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5
-
Peter-
I don’t know what is going on here. It seems as if that drive doesn’t have the proper firmware.
Why turn on Smart monitroing when everything is working?
Jeremy
-
Hi Jeremy
Yep it’s weird – I bought the new drive from a different retailer (Amazon) for ‘safety’ and checked it had the correct Firmware printed on its side.
As an extra safety precaution, after my last hard drive failure, I felt there’d be no harm in turning on Smart monitoring. I was sold at seeing this on a website selling the D800 “S.M.A.R.T. data criteria can be used to notify you of an impending drive failure and enable you to minimize downtime as a result.”
My ATTO Configuration Tool Driver Version for Mac OSX 10.5.8 is 3.3.0 and my flash version is from July 27, 2009.
Peter Dunphy
2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5
-
Where did you turn this on?
-
Under the Raid tab I selected/highlighted the group.
At the top of the screen I went up to Raid Management.
From the drop-down list here I selected Monitor Smart. There’s a tick beside it now that it’s active.
Peter Dunphy
2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5
-
OK, but all of your disks are okay and online?
What SMART is, is a self monitoring system (it stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) which is supposed to warn you of any incosistencies in hopes that you can help to avoid total failures.
Now, that is not to say that your drive is bad or is going bad, it just probably dropped below some level of some measurement. Who knows what it really means, perhaps call Seagate?
If not, just turn it off and wait for a drive to really fail. You will get a warning from the R380, you will put in your spare drive, and you can stop worrying about this.
Jeremy
-
Yep all okay and online. You’re right Jeremy, I guess I’m jumping the gun on this one.
It’s just that, of all the 8 drives I have, the Smart Monitoring decided to flag up the new drive positioned in the exact same location as the previously faulty one. Temporary cause for concern, but I thank you for advising me to relax about it.
Hopefully I don’t have a drive fail anytime soon. I’m still waiting on the replacement but hopefully I’ll get it soon, and relax even more! :o)
Will turn this Smart Monitor off, otherwise I’ll be on a Heart Monitor by October.
Peter Dunphy
2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5
-
Valuable link suggested by Sonnet about meanings of some Smart messages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#ATA_S.M.A.R.T._attributes
Looks like one of the messages I got was just the disk error-checking.
Peter Dunphy
2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5
-
Well, there you go. Nice one.
So, it looks like the time between error corrections went up in your case. I guess that’s good.
?
Jeremy
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up