How to perform disk test attached to LSI RAID controller

Question

I have four Seagate ST33000657 SAS drives attached to LSi 9260-4i controller. I want to test them for hw errors and bad sectors, before launching into production. I ve tried SeaTools, but it's not working with SAS drives. Is there any way to do this ? Any tips will be appreciated.

Solution

You can start a patrol read on all drives and when it finishes check the controller eventlog for events 0x005d (patrol read corrected medium error - type is warning), 0x005f (patrol read uncorrectable error - type is fatal) and 0x0061 (patrol read puncturing bad block - type is fatal).

Create a virtual disk using all disks, which raidlevel you choose doesn't matter. Use MegaCLI to set the patrol read mode to manual and start the patrol read:

MegaCLI -AdpPR -EnblMan -a0
MegaCLI -AdpPR -Start -a0

When the patrol read has finished (you can get the progress using MegaCLI -AdpPR -Info -a0) check the controllers eventlog for the above events:

MegaCLI -AdpEventLog -GetSinceReboot -warning -fatal -a0

If you can't find any then your drives should be fine. This is assuming you only have one LSI controller. If you have multiple you'll need to select the correct one using -aN.

MegaCLI is available for various OSes. There used to be one for EFI also but the current download doesn't include it anymore. You might be able to find an older version of the download somewhere.

Comments

[powerthrash]

Thank you! At the moment "storcli" is available for EFI. How to use the EFI version, by the way?

[lsmooth]

Put the EFI-file on a thumbdrive formatted with FAT32. Plug the thumbdrive in and restart the server. Enter the setup utility and start the internal EFI shell (usually found in boot manager). Once in the shell change path to your thumbdrive using fs0:, fs1: or whatever your thumbdrive is (there should be a list when the shell starts). If you put the file in a folder CD into the folder (cd /folder). Now just type the commands above.

[powerthrash]

Thanks for help! Patrol read finished without errors. But one drive failed during formatting process :( It's strange a bit, but I expected something like that.