Smart status from PERC 5i controller

[Big Jim]

I have just taken recepit of some used SATA drives off ebay and I want to check smart status.
the only machine I have with SAS connectivity is the poweredge server I am intending on installing them in to.

however the normal tools don't work as they can only see the controller which at present isn't passing through the SMART information from the disks to the OS
It is a PE2950 with a PERC 5i integrated controller.
I am running Windows server 2008 R2 (no VM)

 

[fencepost]

It's been a while, but you may be able to get SMART status from the PERC configuration utility when you boot the system. Other than that, I suspect that the Dell OpenManage utilities should provide whatever info is available.

 

[myleso]

Hard disk sentinel can give individual drive status with a perc http://www.hdsentinel.com/

 

[SAFCasper]

Yup Dell OpenManage gives you SMART readings on each individual disk, as well as a lot of other useful information. Highly recommend installing it.

 

[Markverhyden]

Yup Dell OpenManage gives you SMART readings on each individual disk, as well as a lot of other useful information. Highly recommend installing it.

I was expecting OMSA to provide that. But I just checked mine, the ESXi version, and there was nothing that specifically referred to SMART. There is a field that says Status with a value of OK and a ton of other stuff.

 

[Big Jim]

All i can see on OMSA is the below

 

[Markverhyden]

All i can see on OMSA is the below

I'd be concerned about the Non-critical status. Reboot the machine, go into the PERC controller, some cntrl+ <some key> you'll see it on the screen. Once in there cntrl+N to go to PD. There you can see what little they have about the SMART status. The problem with running this through PERC is you may no be able to directly access the drive with other OS based smart utilities depending on how the drives are setup.

 

[Big Jim]

I'd be concerned about the Non-critical status. Reboot the machine, go into the PERC controller, some cntrl+ <some key> you'll see it on the screen. Once in there cntrl+N to go to PD. There you can see what little they have about the SMART status. The problem with running this through PERC is you may no be able to directly access the drive with other OS based smart utilities depending on how the drives are setup.

got the trial version of hard disk sentinel running on the machine now

the non-critical drive is a failing drive. 51 million read errors apparently, 33,000 error corrected
no write errors though


I bought some "unused" 2nd hand drives off ebay to replace this drive, the seller messaged me afterwards to say they made a mistake and the drives had actually been used.
I am trying to find out how many hours use they have had to see if I want to risk moving my storage RAID array over to them.

current drives are a mix of seagate and maxtor 10k and 15k drives, all showing power on count in the millions.
The maxtors have 2 power on figures, one around 4 mill, and 1 around 200 mill
the seagates also have 2 power on figures but they match at around 4 mil

I currently only have one drive from the new batch plugged in which is a 15k Hitachi drive and the power on count is 80k.

I'm just trying to figure out how each drive counts.
if the "new" drives count in hours they will have to go back, but if they count in minutes I'll hang on to them.

any ideas ?

 

[Big Jim]

doesn't matter i'm a nnumpty, there is a summary screen that tells you.
although for the maxtors it has obviously used the 200mill figure and is telling me those drives have all had 138,000 days use, not doing bad for 300 year old drives

 

[Markverhyden]

Maybe one of the data recovery people will pipe up about the powered up time. I would expect that at a hardware level the HD onboard clock samples at the seconds level if not more frequently. Then what ever software used will convert to more meaningful values. And remember that the value can be reset.

Have your tried Crystal Disk?