[OpenIndiana-discuss] ZFS & SMART error

[Richard Elling]

On Jul 5, 2012, at 10:13 AM, Reginald Beardsley wrote:

> I had a power failure last night.  The UPS alarms woke me up and I powered down the systems. (some day I really will automate shutdowns)  It's also been quite hot (90 F) in the room where the computer is.
> 
> At boot the BIOS on the HP Z400 running Solaris 10 reported:
> 
> 1720 SMART drive detects imminent failure
> failing drive SATA 1 (black)
> failing attribute # 05
> 
> The drive is a year old 3 TB Hitachi that I use for a scratch drive.  "zpool scrub" showed no errors.
> 
> Nothing critical on the disk I just use it to hold intermediate files when working on large datasets.
> 
> Unfortunately, "apropos smart" produced nothing useful.  Where would I find more information?  Particularly interaction between ZFS & SMART.

In current OpenIndiana (and illumos), predictive failure notices are sent to FMA as
error reports. However, there is no consumer of those reports -- they are blissfully
ignored :-(  Eventually, when the disk really dies, other FMA agents will react, including
ZFS sparing, as appropriate.

> There have apparently been some firmware issues that produce spurious warnings, but HP is so Windows centric it's hard to make any sense out of their support site.
> 
> Is there a Solaris/OI utility for reading the SMART information or doing other diagnosis?
> 
> The message relates to automatic bad block reallocation.  Would running a scan using format(1m) and mapping out the bad blocks be likely to correct this?  That is what we did way back when.  Though I hate to think how long a scan of 3 TB would take.

No. For modern disks, bad block remapping is done by the disk. What you see
in format is for very old disks where the sector management was done by the OS.
 -- richard

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