Re: [9fans] Petabytes on a budget: JBODs + Linux + JFS

[Eris Discordia <eris.discordia@gmail.com>]

Many thanks for the info :-)

> if there's a single dual-duty led maybe this is the problem.  how
> many sepearte led packages do you have?

There's one multi-color (3-prong) LED responsible for this. Nominally,
green should mean drive running and okay, alternating red should mean
transfer, and orange (red + green) a disk failure. In case of 7200.11's
this works as it should. In case of 7200.12 the light goes orange when the
disk spins up and remains so. At times of transfer it goes red as it should
but returns back to orange instead of green when there's no transfer. I
feared the (new) disk was unhealthy and stressed it for some time but all
seems to be fine except that light.

I tried changing the bay in which the disk sits and the anomaly follows the
disk so I guess the backplane's okay. The tech specifically mentioned
Seagate ES2 as a similar case and told me the disk was fine and it just
lacked support for interacting with the light (directly or through the
backplane, I don't know).

> if you have quanstro/sd installed, sdorion(3) discusses how it
> controls the backplane lights.

Um, I don't have that because I don't have any running Plan 9 instances,
but I'll try finding it on the web (if it's been through man2html at some
time).

--On Friday, September 04, 2009 08:41 -0400 erik quanstrom
<quanstro@quanstro.net> wrote:

>> This caught my attention and you are the storage expert here. Is there
>> an  equivalent technology on SATA disks for controlling enclosure
>> facilities?  (Other than SMART, I mean, which seems to be only for
>> monitoring and not  for control.)
>
> SES-2/SGPIO typically interact with the backplane, not the drive itself.
> you can use either one with any type of disk you'd like.
>
>> I have this SATA backplan-inside-enclosure with 3x Barracuda 7200 series
>> 1  TB disks attached. The enclosure lights for the two 7200.11's respond
>> the  right way but the one that's ought to represent the 7200.12 freaks
>> out  (goes multi-color). Have you experienced anything similar? The tech
>> at the  enclosure vendor tells me some Seagate disks don't support
>> control of  enclosure lights.
>
> not really.  the green (activity) light is drive driven and sometimes
> doesn't work due to different voltage / pull up resistor conventions.
> if there's a single dual-duty led maybe this is the problem.  how
> many sepearte led packages do you have?
>
> the backplane chip could simply be misprogrammed.  do the lights
> follow the drive?  have you tried resetting the lights.
>
> if you have quanstro/sd installed, sdorion(3) discusses how it
> controls the backplane lights.
>
> - erik
>