Hi folks,

I have already asked this question on Seagate Community Forums, while get no reply. So I have to paste it here for more widely help.

I have 12 Seagate SATA2 hard drivers(ST370330NS, FW: sn04), as known, this type hard drivers implement 32MB cache. There's a LSI MegaRAID controller(1078E) on my board, which can support RAID 5. Then I input all 12 harddisks to the backplane connected with server board, and create two RAID 5 arrays acrossing 11 disks via LSI WebBIOS. These two created RAID 5 have been fully slow-initialization(it costs about 6-7 hours).

After the initialization accomplished, create file system(xfs), and mount them on local directory which is configured for NFS share usage. Then, on the other Linux client, I try to write data to this NFS share. At that moment, the LEDs of hard disk are glaring as expected.

I stop the write testing in three hours, and plug out the cable on my serverboard. However, I see the LEDs are still glaring. I wonder it is caused by cache, so I have to wait. And after 4 hours glaring, I become to loss patient.

Why do the LEDs keep glaring so long? I have already plugged out the network cable, it should have no transfer existing.

I also tried Seagate 16MB cache disks in the same chassis, the harddisk LEDs will not be glaring when no I/O occurs. This sympton seems to be acceptable and prove my server chassis is good.

Would you please give me any suggestion on my case? It seems to be only happened according to 32MB cache disks.

Any hint or suggestion would be appreciated.

Kindly regards,
Phillip

I have had a similar issue a while back, also with brand new Seagate hard drive, though it was not SATA.
I bought the drive new, and it appeared to work at first, but within a week or two, I began seeing the LED staying on for longer and longer, when there was no disk activity. It turned out in my case, that the hard drive was defective. I returned it, and had it replaced with an identical unit (though with a different firmware version) and the problem was gone.
The drive in question repeatedly failed both the SMART disgnostic tests, as well as the Seagate Seatools-Desktop disgnostics routines.

Another time I had the same/similar problem was when I got a new SATA (SCSI) optical CD/DVD unit. This unit, I think because of the IDE/SATA controller configuration of my motherboard (nVIdia) makes the HDD LED light up when it is in use, as well as lighting its own LEDs. Most of the time it works fine, however, if I or an application sends it a command that it doesn't understand (inappropriate ioctl for device), the drive seems to get confused, and/or the controller gets confused, and thereafter the HDD LED will remain on, or will flash forever, indicating a read/write/IOctl error. Sometimes when this happens, the SATA drive will become unusable until reset or rebooted.

While both of my cases are different than yours, my point I am making is that in my limited experience with SATA and/or a SATA controller and/or a Seagate harddrive, an LED that remains on forever seems to indicate that some sort of IO error has occurred.

I don't know a lot about RAID setups, but I suspect that trying to disconnect one or more of the drives to see if you can narrow it down to one device, is probably a time consuming pain in the neck. As such, I suggest you start by checking thoroughly through any relevant log files on the system connected to the drives (nfs log, syslog, messages log, etc..) for signs of disk errors. Also of course, check DMESG. I strongly believe that there will be signs in some log or another, telling you that something is not working quite right.

As for diagnostics, I suggest (to eliminate hardware problem from the equation) you run either SMART diagnostics on the drives with Linux Smartctl (smartmon tools), or download "Seagate Seatools Desktop" as an ISO, burn it to disk, and use that to run diagnostics on the drives. Once hardware malfunction is eliminated from the equation, focus on logs for signs of what's going wrong.

I hope this helps you in some way; best of success.

SVA

Hi,GrapefruiTgirl

Thanks for your kindly help. I'll update testing result in a few days.

Regards,
Phillip