Once in a while, we encounter input/output errors on one of our disks.
Our server (DELL PowerEdge R720, Ubuntu 14.04) uses the Perc H710 Raid controller, and the disk that is producing the error is a Dell 600GB SAS 6Gbps 15k 3.5" disk.
We can always fix the errors, using fsck.ext4
, but we have no idea what might cause them to occur.
We've updated the server firmware to the latest version, and ran all of the tests we could think of.
What else could we do to find the source of the problem?
EDIT:
We have contacted DELL about a week ago, and after they instructed me how to run several tests, they concluded that the server is fine, and that nothing unusual showed up in the tests.
I couldn't enable SMART support for the device:
$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.13.0-55-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor: DELL
Product: PERC H710
Revision: 3.13
User Capacity: 1,199,101,181,952 bytes [1.19 TB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
Logical Unit id: 0x6b8ca3a0f210dc0019eead8c1111fb0a
Serial number: 000afb11118cadee1900dc10f2a0a38c
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Wed Jul 8 10:47:35 2015 IDT
SMART support is: Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
Error Counter logging not supported
Device does not support Self Test logging
and i tried:
$ sudo smartctl -s on /dev/sda
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [x86_64-linux-3.13.0-55-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
=== START OF ENABLE/DISABLE COMMANDS SECTION ===
unable to fetch IEC (SMART) mode page [unsupported field in scsi command]
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.
Also, i'm not sure what to make of this (googling didn't help):
$ sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
SG_IO: bad/missing sense data, sb[]: 70 00 05 00 00 00 00 0d 00 00 00 00 20 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
ATA device, with non-removable media
Standards:
Likely used: 1
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 0 0
heads 0 0
sectors/track 0 0
--
Logical/Physical Sector size: 512 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 0 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 0 MBytes
cache/buffer size = unknown
Capabilities:
IORDY not likely
Cannot perform double-word IO
R/W multiple sector transfer: not supported
DMA: not supported
PIO: pio0
Any advice is most welcomed !