4210 Frequent Drive Failure
by Dane Henry
on
May 30, 2008 at 4:09:25 pm
Purchased a 4210 in March. Within a 2 weeks I had to rebuild side A, thankfully everything worked smooth. End of April Drive went down, Ciprico was great and sent out a replacement. It's now end of May and another drive (on the same side) has gone down. This is my first time working with a large array system, is this normal for drives to be going out so frequently? I have quit a few 500gb - 1tb g-raids and haven't had any problems with drive failures in the last 2 years. I may have just been lucky but my only encounter with the dreaded "drive failure" has been with the highest cost storage solution we have gone with , the 4210.
Ciprico's support has been outstanding and I am in no way bashing the company, I just want to know if this is normal to happen so frequent.
Also, could something I'm doing be causing this? The 4210 is direct connected (Fibre Channel) to one of our Mac Pros. The Array is shutdown everynight, on suggestion from our IT guy, because the edit suite can get really hot from all the machines going. Am I making a mistake by shutting it down everynight? I know that they don't shutdown their big blade servers, but they have a dedicated cooling system for their server room. Sometimes our 2nd Mac Pro goes in and grabs a clip or dumps a finished piece onto the 4210. This is over an ethernet network connected to both macs. When this is happening I don't let the direct connected Mac access the 4210, in "Fear" of having two computers trying to control it with out SAN software and a switch.
I've got a call into Ciprico but I would like to hear from others if this happens as frequent.
Thanks,
Dane Henry
HeavenlyTV
skiheavenly.com
3ghz 8core Mac Pro
4gb Ram
Decklink Hd Extreme
4gb Fibre Card
Ciprico 4210 fibre
Re: 4210 Frequent Drive Failure by Dane Henry on May 30, 2008 at 6:10:36 pm
Just updating this topic:
Ciprico thinks it could have more to do with The timing on the new Hitachi drives. As the drive is not down, just on start up the drive is retiming wrong, if I understood them correct. There is a new firmware that addresses this, 02.9d.
I'm in the midst of rebuilding side B and will update if this corrected the issue.
Re: 4210 Frequent Drive Failure by Victor Valdez on May 30, 2008 at 8:19:50 pm
Hi Dane,
Yes you are correct. There were occurrences where drive failures were caused by longer initialization times in the newer Hitachi drives we use. Updating the firmware corrects this issue.
