Product manual

Chapter 8: Troubleshooting
399
Physical Drive Problems
Physical drives are the foundation of data storage. A physical drive problem can
affect your entire RAID system.
When a yellow ! icon or a red X icon appears beside a physical drive,
check the drive's operational status:
1. Click the Device tab.
2. Click the Physical Drive icon.
3. Click the physical drive you want, then click the View button.
Look under Operational Status for the condition of the physical drive.
• Offline – Check the drive for:
• PFA Condition – Caused by a bad block or sector. See Note 1
below.
• Stale Condition – Caused by obsolete array information on the
physical drive. See Note 2 below.
• Not Usable – This condition occurs when you have:
• Two controllers in your RAID subsystem and a SATA drive without a
SAS-to-SATA adapter. See Note 3 below.
• A missing or defective SAS cable between the RAID subsystem
and a JBOD expansion unit.
• Drive Failed or Dead – The physical drive cannot be repaired. You
must replace the failed drive. See Note 4 below.
Note 1: Clear the error condition. Then the physical drive is available. See
“Clearing a Stale or a PFA Condition” on page 147.
Note 2: Identify the disk array to which the physical drive belongs. Then delete
the disk array. If the error condition remains on the physical drive, clear the error
condition.
Note 3: Obtain SAS-to-SATA adapters though PROMISE Technology, at
http://www.promise.com. See “Installing Physical Drives” on page 21 for
installation instructions.
Note 4: You can set the number of bad blocks tolerated before the controller
marks a physical drive as Dead. See “Making PDM Settings” on page 121 or
“Making Background Activity Settings” on page 273.
See also: “Media Patrol” on page 331 and Disk Array Degraded. “Disk Array
Degraded/Logical Drive Critical” on page 400.