Intel RAID Basic Troubleshooting Guide

Drive State Definition Intel® RAID Basic Troubleshooting Guide
Revision 2.0
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2. Drive State Definition
2.1 Physical Drive (PD) State
The SAS Software Stack firmware defines the following states for physical disks connected to
the controller.
 Unconfigured Good – A disk is accessible to the RAID controller but is not configured
as part of a virtual disk. For example, a new drive inserted into a system.
 Online – A disk accessible to the RAID controller and configured as part of a virtual disk.
 Failed – A disk drive that is part of a virtual disk, but has failed and is no longer usable.
 Rebuild – A disk drive where data is written to restore full redundancy to a virtual disk.
 Unconfigured Bad – A hard drive that is no longer part of an array and that is known to
be bad. This state is typically assigned to a drive that has failed but is no longer part of a
configured virtual disk because it has been replaced by a hot-spare drive.
 Foreign – When disks are imported from a different RAID controller (foreign metadata),
the physical disk is marked as foreign until user action is taken to add the configuration
on the disks to the existing configuration on the controller. Foreign is not a drive state,
but it indicates that a drive is from another configuration. Foreign drives typically have a
state of Unconfigured Good until they are imported into the current configuration. For
example, powering on with drives that contain a RAID set that have not previously been
installed in the system.
 Hot spare – A disk drive that is defined as a hot spare. If the hot spare is not activated,
the online LED is displayed.
 Offline – A disk drive that is still part of a configured virtual disk drive, but is not active
(that is, the data is invalid). This state is used to represent a configured drive with invalid
data. This state can occur as a transition state, or due to user action.
2.2 Virtual Disk (VD) State
The following states are defined for virtual disks on the controller:
 Optimal – A virtual drive with online member drives.
 Partially Degraded – A virtual disk with a redundant RAID level capable of sustaining
more than one member disk failure, where there is one or more member failure but the
virtual disk in not degraded or offline.
 Degraded – A virtual disk with a redundant RAID level and one or more member failures
that cannot sustain a subsequent drive failure.
 Offline – A virtual disk with one or more member disk failures that make the data
inaccessible.