# Dell PowerEdge 2850 Hard Drive Failures

## ryker

I have Gentoo installed on a new Dell PowerEdge 2850 with dual 3.2GHz Xeon's and 4 15k rpm WD SCSI drives in a raid 5.  This system has been running since January this year.  There have really been no problems except that I have had 3 hard drives fail on me since I set it up.  The first one failed around the beginning of March.  The second one, 3 weeks later, and now another has failed.

My question is: Do you think there is something I may have done wrong, or not done at all, that could be causing my hard drives to fail prematurely?  This is both my first time using scsi drives and my first time using a nice 2U rack server, so I guess I may have not done something properly.

The server itself is kept in our server room which is temperature and humidity controlled.  So, I don't think overheating is a problem.

Any input would be appreciated.

Thanks

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## !equilibrium

you are sure it is an hardware failure and not a software failure such as the filesystem?

which filesystem you are using?

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## ryker

I don't think it's the filesystem.  I'm using ext3 and after I replaced each hard drive I rebooted and ran a consistency check on the array.  It showed everything was fine.  The consistency check I did was using the embedded PERC controllers utility.  Is there a command line software utility that I can/should use also to test from inside the OS?

I'm using LVM2 also.  I followed the Gentoo docs for setting up LVM.

Thanks for your help.

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## !equilibrium

ok, i don not think it is a filesystem problem, but is very strang a threee hardware failures in so short time; if you can, check the SCSI controller into some Dell Assistance Center, it is probably that there is a bug hardware problem some where (ora you are very unliky and you buyed 3 bad HDs... can happen)

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## ryker

Thanks again for the help.  I think I must be very unlucky.  I've been on the phone with Dell tech support.  They gave me a utility to grab the PERC controller log and send it to them.  According to them, the controller is fine.  I knew I shouldn't have gone with 15k rpm drives.  I probably would have had better luck with the 10k rpm ones instead.

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## !equilibrium

 *ryker wrote:*   

> Thanks again for the help.  I think I must be very unlucky.  I've been on the phone with Dell tech support.  They gave me a utility to grab the PERC controller log and send it to them.  According to them, the controller is fine.  I knew I shouldn't have gone with 15k rpm drives.  I probably would have had better luck with the 10k rpm ones instead.

 

probably your supplier have a stock of broken HDs :/ 

very unlucky, before to buy another one (in case of failure) inform of the fact the dealer or change it  :Very Happy: 

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## dstutz97

FWIW, We have a couple 2850s at work with (if my memory is right) 3x73gig 10k rpm drives on the embedded PERC controller in a RAID 5 configuration.  The machines are maybe 2-3 months old and on one I noticed a failure light and the LED panel was orange.  I went into the controller config and it said the drive status was "FAILED".  I called support and the guy had us run a resync operation and after that she's purring along good as new.  I guess in terms of the raid controller "FAILED" just means that the drive isn't good enough to participate in the array, not necessarily a hardware failure.

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