How to identify failed drive/port on 3ware card

Question

I have a 3ware 9650-SE controller with 2 drives in RAID-1 configuration. The drive on "port 1" has an error but the drive cages aren't labeled. I tried using the cli to "identify" the drive but tw_cli just spits out "N/A". I thought this might blink the drive activity LED but no:

# tw_cli /c7/p1 set identify=on
Setting port Identify on /c7/p1 to [on] ... N/A

How can I blink the drive activity of the individual port to find out which drive in the array is the one which is bad?

Solution 1

Found a way to do it using the "show all" command on a shell loop:

# while [ 1 ] ;do  tw_cli  /c7/p0 show all; done

This creates sufficient access to the individual drive (p0) to blink the light on the drive bay.

Solution 2

Now, if you happened to inherit a Windows Server with a 3ware RAID card, you can do something similar with powershell:

PS C:\Users\Administrator> while ( 1 ) { tw_cli /c7/p0 show all }

And, when you have replaced the drive and want to see the rebuild status, you can use the same trick to get something similar to the watch command in Linux:

PS C:\Users\Administrator> while ( 1 ) { clear ; tw_cli info c7 ; sleep 5 }

HTH.

Comments

[Michael Simons]

Same problems here… Thanks for the neat workaround.