Apple RAID Card - Battery failed (code 0x#0 = 18)

Hello,
Upon start up of the computer I get a message that says "The Apple RAID Card installed in your system requires your attention".
When I open up the RAID Utility I have messages like -
Battery failed (code 0x#0 = 18)
Write cache disabled due to insufficient Battery Charge
Can anyone explain what this means and what I should now do?
Do I need a new Battery and does this mean my RAID 5 isn't saving data correctly?
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Kris

Hello
I have the same problem too:
Battery failed (code 0x#0 = 18)
or in my case, I am german: Die Batterie funktioniert nicht (Code 0x#0 = 18)
It happened the first time after one year and I replaced the battery. One year later it happened again and I replaced the battery. And one more year later again. This time I decided not to replace the battery.
I booted the system from the recovery media and started the the raid utility from there and it said: battery charging.
So I returned to my "normal" partition and it said: battery charging.
A few days later: Battery failed (code 0x#0 = 18)
I repeaded this several times, always with the same result.
I was quite sure that all the trouble resulted from a firmware bug.
So I did shut down my Mac, and removed my raid card. On the raid card I disconnected the battery and waited a few minutes and reconnected it. I reassembled all and started my Mac.
It is running now for more than a month without any further errors.

Similar Messages

Apple Raid Card Battery Failed

Hey guys !
I have an early 2008 Mac Pro with a Raid Card and i get this message battery failure other than expired
actually i got this message again about an year or so back ... so yes it happened before ... Apple replaced my battery
Now im out of warranty coverage.
Questions are :
How does this affect my Raid Set ?
Can my Raid Set survive without the battery ?
If yes ... what are the downsides ?
What can i do to manage the situation without changing again the battery ?
Hope to get some advice soon on this matter
Thank you very much.
PS
Down below i pasted some specs for my machine
Mac Pro RAID Card:
PCI Slot:          Slot-4
Hardware Version:          1.00
Firmware Version:          M-2.0.5.5
Expansion ROM Version:          0018
Shutdown Status:          Normal shutdown
Write Cache Enabled:          No
Battery Info:
Firmware Revision:          1.0.2
First Installed:          1/1/01 2:16 AM
Last Date Conditioned:          2/24/12 3:47 PM
State:          Faulted Battery
Fault:          Battery failed (other than expired)
Status:
Charging:          No
Conditioning:          No
Connected:          Yes
Discharging:          No
Sufficient Charge:          No
Drives:
Bay 1:
Product ID:          ST3300655SS
Serial Number:          3LM35BGK00009827PBXY
Firmware Revision:          A005
Type:          SAS
SMART Status:          Unsupported
Capacity:          300 GB (299,999,999,488 bytes)
RAID Sets:          RS1
Status:
Assigned:          Yes
Failed:          No
Foreign:          No
Missing:          No
Reliable:          Yes
Roaming:          No
Spare:          No
Bay 2:
Product ID:          ST3300655SS
Serial Number:          3LM622YT00009923HP5Q
Firmware Revision:          A005
Type:          SAS
SMART Status:          Unsupported
Capacity:          300 GB (299,999,999,488 bytes)
RAID Sets:          RS1
Status:
Assigned:          Yes
Failed:          No
Foreign:          No
Missing:          No
Reliable:          Yes
Roaming:          No
Spare:          No
Bay 3:
Product ID:          ST3300655SS
Serial Number:          3LM2Y49T00009827PAZV
Firmware Revision:          A005
Type:          SAS
SMART Status:          Unsupported
Capacity:          300 GB (299,999,999,488 bytes)
RAID Sets:          R0-3
Status:
Assigned:          Yes
Failed:          No
Foreign:          No
Missing:          No
Reliable:          Yes
Roaming:          No
Spare:          No
RAID Sets:
R0-3:
RAID Level:          Enhanced JBOD
Capacity:          299.8 GB (299,798,364,160 bytes)
Available Capacity:          Zero KB
Drives:          Bay 3
Volumes:          Vol-R0-3
Status:          Viable (Good)
RS1:
RAID Level:          0
Capacity:          599.73 GB (599,730,946,048 bytes)
Available Capacity:          Zero KB
Drives:          Bay 1, Bay 2
Volumes:          R1V1
Status:          Viable (Good)
Volumes:
R1V1:
BSD Name:          disk1
Capacity:          599.73 GB (599,730,946,048 bytes)
Read Command Size:          2 MB
Read Ahead Margin:          16 MB
RAID Set:          RS1
Status:
Degraded:          No
Inited:          Yes
In Transition:          No
Viable:          Yes
Vol-R0-3:
BSD Name:          disk2
Capacity:          299.8 GB (299,798,364,160 bytes)
Read Command Size:          2 MB
Read Ahead Margin:          16 MB
RAID Set:          R0-3
Status:
Degraded:          No
Inited:          Yes
In Transition:          No
Viable:          Yes
Hardware Overview:
Model Name:          Mac Pro
Model Identifier:          MacPro3,1
Processor Name:          Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed:          3.2 GHz
Number Of Processors:          2
Total Number Of Cores:          8
L2 Cache (per processor):          12 MB
Memory:          8 GB
Bus Speed:          1.6 GHz
Boot ROM Version:          MP31.006C.B05

The RAID card battery backs up the memory buffers on the card. These are needed for calculating the checksum blocks used in RAID 5 and similar schemes.
If you are not running RAID 5 or similar, you do not need the battery. For that matter, you do not need the RAID card, either (unless you are running SAS drives).

Xserve / internal RAID card / Battery Failed (code 0x#0 = 18)

Hi, RAID utility is reporting a battery problem. I have rebooted xserve once, the problem went away, the battery was charged but now I have the problem again.
The result is a disabled write cache, which reduces performance.
Changing the battery is quite a big effort, so I really would like to avoid this. Any ideas, what the problem might be and how to solve it?

Hi Lordlobby,
I've had this on 2, 2008 xserves. Started off randomly happening that the RAID card would report the same error code which wasn't down to the discharge cycle. It became worse so the battery was replaced and it's been fine since... It's about 15mins work to replace the battery..
Good luck
Beatle

Repair Apple RAID card battery

I have an Apple RAID card Mac Pro (Early 2009) RAID Card (top picture) with a bad battery. Unfortunately these batteries usually die after a few years and the replacement is not cheap. Looking on ebay, I can only get them from the US, but I live in Europe and it will cost me at least $150.
From what I suspect reading the case, the battery is a 3.7 V Lithium battery, probably with built-in electronics that I can perhaps get for $5 from China. Any soldering work is not a problem. If I can replace the digitizer of an iPad mini, I can probably replace a battery too.
The case of the battery looks like a regular aluminum box and the lit is probably just glued onto the battery. It's seems quite sturdy and would require some force to open. Has anyone ever opened an Apple Raid Card battery? I'm reluctant to apply much heat to open the case, though external heat might be ok. Any ideas? I'm aware of the risks.

To summarise the 'end of days' issue with RAID5 the problem is that with the much bigger size of hard disks now available and being used e.g. 4TB or even bigger, it takes so long to rebuild a RAID5 array when replacing a faulty drive that the chance of another drive failing during the rebuild is becoming more and more likely. This is actually made worse by the fact that a RAID rebuild causes a lot of activity and therefore 'stress' on the hard disks in order to do the rebuild process. It can take more than 24 hours to do a complete RAID5 rebuild and during all that time you are vulnerable to a complete failure.
RAID6 is a partial solution in that you start off with redundancy provided by two drives rather than RAID5 which has just one so RAID6 can survive two drive failures. It however only reduces the chances of having a complete RAID failure during a rebuild it does not eliminate it.
Standard RAID5 or RAID6 therefore is being increasingly viewed as having reached a brick wall.
For Enterprises i.e. those with lots of money you can just throw more drives at the problem e.g. RAID10. For the rest of us the hope is on new alternatives to RAID5. The one I am particularly excited about is BTRFS, this is a combination of both a RAID layer and a file-system layer, it is able to use file checksums from the file-system layer to spot and fix RAID issues and this is orders of magnitude more efficient than having to do a complete RAID resync/rebuild. This approach has two advantages, firstly it protects a problem described as 'bit rot' whereby a byte or block in a file can become corrupted, the checksums allow this to be detected and automatically fixed, the second is that it can do a rebuild of actual real data whereas a normal RAID rebuild rebuilds all blocks on a drive even empty ones.
BTRFS is still pre-release especially its equivalent of RAID5 and RAID6 but it is getting closer. (RAID 0 and 1 for BTRFS are already considered ready for use.)
ZFS is a similar 'new' file-system to BTRFS and at one point there was talk that Apple were going to switch to using ZFS but this no longer looks like happening. ZFS was a solution being developed and 'owned' by Sun Microsystems who are now part of Oracle. BTRFS is free open-source.
I personally hope that Apple at some point implement BTRFS.
There are some NAS manufacturers already implementing BTRFS however they are currently 'cheating'. NetGear for example use BTRFS on their current ReadyNAS OS 6.x models but rather than using a 'pure' BTRFS approach have a implemented BTRFS on top of a standard RAID5 system created by mdraid. They did this because as I mentioned above the official BTRFS RAID5/6 solution is not yet ready for real-world use. As a result you get some of the benefits of BTRFS like being more easily able to expand the size of a file-system, but you don't get the full checksum derived protection of BTRFS because it is not integrated to the RAID level. Thecus I believe have gone the same approach as NetGear. Synology and QNAP are still waiting for BTRFS to be 'finished' before implementing it.

What's the difference in Apple RAID card battery error messages?

I have a Mac Pro with 2 quad core Intel Harpertown CPUs at 3.2GHz, and an Apple RAID card. RAID Utility shows that the battery failed but in my research, nobody explains the difference between "Battery failed (code 0x#0 = 17)" (which is what I have) and "Battery failed (code 0x#0 = 18)" or ""Battery failed (other than expired)" (the latter two are what everybody talks about) and what the code numbers mean. Speaking to a local AASP, they recommend that I just wait for a couple of days to see if it's doing the automatic 72-hour reconditioning operation since my Mac Pro is attached to a pretty hefty UPS (2200VA with nothing else attached) and power failures where I live are rare plus the write cache has been disabled so the RAID card is basically doing write-throughs at the moment. But curiosity about the various, different error codes and messages is getting the better of me. Thanks in advance.
Also, what's worrying me (since RAID Utility is so vague) is this entry I found under "Hardware RAID" in System Profiler:
Status:
Charging:          No
Conditioning:          No
Connected:          Yes
Discharging:          No
Sufficient Charge:          No

As an update to this, once I replaced the RAID card battery (which was an absolute nightmare--the writer of the instructions at Apple obviously had never done it for real nor seen it done since they omit a lot of important things), the problem went away. But I'm still intrigued about what the error codes mean.

Apple RAID Card -Battery Conditioning

Does anyone how long conditioning takes (it's been at it several hours already)?
Is it possible to re-schedule it for out of hours? Failing that is it possible to force-enable writing caching even when the battery is unavailable?
The 'small drop in performance' mentioned in the user guide makes the difference between working well and being completely useless for me capturing video.
I may as well have stayed home today.
Any advise appreciated...

http://discussions.apple.com/click.jspa?searchID=-1&messageID=7649062

RAID Card reports ERROR: Battery failed (code 0x#0 = 18). Help!

Hi,
I have a MacPro computer that has 4 drives and Apple's Hardware RAID Card installed. It's been working great, but we first received notification via RAID Utility of the following error: 5/23/09:Battery failed (code 0x#0 = 18). We ignored it because we have a project in the works. Computer is degraded in performance, and we can tell. Restarted and got the notification: 5/24/09: Controller reports RAID System 72-hour battery reserve unavailable. System is configured to run without battery.
What shall we do to get this working again.
I reallly appreciate any and all pointers. Apples online help didn't appear to be operating correctly today, Sunday, May 25.
Thanks, and so long for now, TOM

Unfortunately, this is a widely known issue with Apple's raid card. I would get in touch with Apple as soon as possible; not online help, but actually call them.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=439873
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1405187&start=0&tstart=0

RAID card battery conditioning - "Battery failed (other than expired)"

OK, so if you log-in using the GUI, you get a warning telling you that battery conditioning is happening and that you shouldn't the server.
However, if you log-in over SSH, as you might, for instance, with a headless Xserve, you don't get that warning. And then, if you restart more than a certain number of times, for instance because you're installing all the software updates that the server has missed while it hasn't been switched on, you end up in the following state:
$ raidutil list status
Apple raidutil version: 1.2.0
General Status: Issues Found
Battery fault. See Battery Status below.
Battery Status: Battery failed (other than expired)
Controller #1: Hardware Version 2.00/Firmware E-1.3.2.0
Write Cache disabled
Plainly this is undesirable.
Does anyone know how to reset the battery state, preferably without having to pull the server out of its rack and disconnect the RAID card battery?
Also, since when was it in any way reasonable to tell a user that they can't shut their machine down for 24 hours? Even with a server, that's ridiculous - sometimes you just have to reboot.
Kind regards,
Alastair.

FWIW, I just filed rdar://7653429 about the fact that terminal users don't get any warning of this, and rdar://7653468 about the fact that battery conditioning shouldn't force sysadmins to keep their machine running for the next 24 hours (since they might really need to shut it down, right now).

2010 Mac Pro with Apple RAID card - "Drive carrier 00:03 removed"

I've got a 2010 Mac Pro with the Apple RAID card and 4 internal identical Seagate ST32000641AS 2TB drives inside.
I've never had a problem with the RAID card (either battery or in operation) except for one thing:
Almost every time I shut the machine down (which I try to do as rarely as possible), it keeps losing Drive 3, the spare.
(See RAID Utility event log snippet below.)
[I wish I could understand why this Apple RAID card keeps losing the spare across power-cycles/reboots, but I digress.]
So I just adopted it as the spare and it spawns the rebuild and many hours later, everything's fine again.
... until the last time I rebooted (Jan. 2nd).
After the usual "I lost the spare" message upon login, it began the rebuild.
But this time, about 11 1/2 hours later the rebuild stopped and RAID Utility reported "Drive carrier 00:03 removed".
Bay 3 is now missing in the Controller view.
I powered off the system last night, and left it off overnight. Today I took all the drives out, blew the dust off and reseated them.
Same thing. Drive 3 is still missing, and now the rebuild task aborted.
The drive bay location shouldn't matter, right? Can I swap the Bay 3 drive with the Bay 4 drive?
I figure one of two things would happen:
(1) It will report Bay 3 as being there but Bay 4 as being missing, same situation as is now. Meaning the problem is in the Bay 3 spare drive.
(2) It will report Bay 3 as being missing (despite a 'good' drive being present) and Bay 4 will be the (unattached) spare, and the RAID set will be unviable. Meaning the problem is with the drive bay itself, not whatever drive is plugged into it.
If "Drive carrier removed" is trying to tell me the disk is bad, why do I not see any log messages about it? I suppose a spare that never gets used could go bad from lack of use, but ... no messages at all?
Hesitant to plunk down $160 on a new spare disk if the present one isn't actually dead ...
% sudo raidutil list raidsetinfo
                                     Total     Avail
Raidsets      Type       Drives       Size      Size Comments
RS1           RAID 5     1,2,4      5.23TB    0.00MB Rebuild: 0% complete
% sudo raidutil list driveinfo
Drives Raidset       Size      Flags
Bay #1 RS1             2.00TB   IsMemberOfRAIDSet:RS1 IsReliable
Bay #2 RS1             2.00TB   IsMemberOfRAIDSet:RS1 IsReliable
Bay #4 RS1             2.00TB   IsMemberOfRAIDSet:RS1 IsReliable
Event log snippet:
Saturday, January 11, 2014 8:15:19 AM PT
Background task aborted: Task=Rebuild,Scope=DRVGRP,Group=RS1
informational
Friday, January 3, 2014 3:50:28 AM PT
Drive carrier 00:03 removed
informational
Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:29:37 PM PT
Marked drive in bay 3 as a global spare
informational
Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:29:28 PM PT
Adopted drive in bay 3
informational
Thursday, January 2, 2014 4:28:34 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
critical
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:35:17 PM PT
Marked drive in bay 3 as a global spare
informational
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:35:08 PM PT
Adopted drive in bay 3
informational
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:34:11 PM PT
The "RedundancyScrub" command could not be executed. (Invalid request or invalid parameter in the request.)
warning
Saturday, December 7, 2013 5:34:03 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
critical
Friday, December 6, 2013 4:56:47 AM PT
Battery finished conditioning
informational
Thursday, December 5, 2013 9:53:44 PM PT
Battery started scheduled conditioning cycle (write cache disabled)
informational
Friday, September 6, 2013 10:53:11 PM PT
Battery finished conditioning
informational
Friday, September 6, 2013 3:41:33 PM PT
Battery started scheduled conditioning cycle (write cache disabled)
informational
Saturday, June 8, 2013 3:41:35 PM PT
Battery finished conditioning
informational
Saturday, June 8, 2013 8:37:49 AM PT
Battery started scheduled conditioning cycle (write cache disabled)
informational
Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:09:51 PM PT
Marked drive in bay 3 as a global spare
informational
Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:09:42 PM PT
Adopted drive in bay 3
informational
Thursday, May 30, 2013 4:08:59 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1 - No spare available for rebuild
critical
Thursday, May 30, 2013 3:32:29 PM PT
Degraded RAID set RS1
warning

Power Pig wrote:
"Hesitant to plunk down $160 on a new spare disk if the present one isn't actually dead ...
% sudo raidutil list raidsetinfo
                                     Total     Avail
Raidsets      Type       Drives       Size      Size Comments
RS1           RAID 5     1,2,4      5.23TB    0.00MB Rebuild: 0% complete
I was talking about this.
This looks like a RAID 5 setup without the parity to me. I would said it basically a RAID 0.
Also you metioned "I guess that previous spare must really have gone 'bad', despite having never been used! "
I wiped everything out, I selected the 3 disks and clicked on "Create RAID Set" with RAID5 selected and the "Use unassigned drives as spares" option checked. The 3rd disk has always been marked as the spare ever since then. You do not have a choice to create a "RAID5 setup without the parity". If I wanted a RAID0 I would have chosen a RAID0! raidutil now says
% sudo raidutil list raidsetinfo
                                     Total     Avail
Raidsets      Type       Drives       Size      Size Comments
RS1           RAID 5     1,2,3,4    5.23TB    0.00MB No tasks running
Every time the system would 'lose' Drive 3 on boot, I would just keep rebooting until it was 'found', and then manually re-assign the now-'floating' drive as the spare - and the RAID would rebuild.
There was never a problem until the day that prompted this post - when it would not find Drive 3 no matter what I did. I turned the Mac Pro off for several hours until the drives had all cooled down and it still did not find the drive. I left the machine on but unmounted the degraded volume until I got the new replacement drive.
I really don't understand what you are getting at. It's like you are trying to tell me I set it up as a 4-drive RAID5 with no parity(!) and that I was in grave danger because one of the disks was gone. The actual RAID contents (spread across Drives 1, 2 and 4) were never in danger, unless a 2nd disk had failed while the spare was not seen by the Apple RAID card. I wasn't too worried about that happening.

How can I force the Disk Cache on with Apple Raid Card?

I have an apple raid card in my mac pro that has now had it's battery fail twice. I don't really want to keep putting money into this and would rather just force the disk cache on and hope my UPS works, I don't use this box for real work anymore anyway and it's all backed up.
There used to be a force on button next to the Write Cahce Status section, but that seems to have gone away. Does anyone know how to force the cache on? Permanently if possible.

OK, Command Line fun, use at your own risk:
sudo raidutil modify controller -E

XServe Battery failed (code 0x#0=18)

Hi guys – I need help?
I recently purchased 3 XServes and I noticed that one on them displays this message “ (Battery failed (code 0x#0=18)” error messages in the RAID controller. I did find similar posting with no solution. I was just wondering if you have similar issue and can guide me on this?
Would you please reply?
Thanks and regards
jd

GSX says to try disconnecting and re-connecting the battery. Getting to the battery to remove it seems pretty difficult from the manual but can anybody confirm whether or not you need to remove the raid card, fans etc just to unplug it? I'd just as soon buy a new one and replace it once instead of having to shut down and dismantle it twice.

Apple RAID Card (Early 2009) Firmware Update 1.1

The update is recommend for all Mac Pro (Early 2009) and Xserve (Early 2009) systems with the Apple RAID card.
This update provides several fixes, including:
Reliability improvements during boot and power fail recovery
Improves handling of hard drives with bad blocks
Improves RAID 1 read performance
Improves hard drive compatibility with non-Apple drives
Improves support for systems with 48GB or larger memory
Improves battery handling and reporting
This update requires Mac OS X v10.5.8 or Mac OS X Server v10.5.8 or later. You will need to restart your computer as part of the update process.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3831
After this update has successfully completed,
your RAID Firmware Version will be: E-1.3.2.0
The updater application will be installed in the /Applications/Utilities folder and will launch automatically. Please follow the instructions in the updater application to complete the update process.

I have a few of these RAID cards in a couple servers, and then I have an earlier version of the RAID card in a few different servers.
The earlier servers are running non-apple 1.5 TB drives. It will be interesting to learn if this firmware update will indeed allow me to boost the capacity by installing non-apple drives, as the firmware previously has not.
Ohh I'm excited to update and try! This will greatly help out if it does!

How do I determine what needs attention on my Apple RAID card?

Every time I turn on the computer, I get a message that says," The Apple RAID Card installed in your system requires your attention."
This is what I have: RAID 065-7214 Mac Pro RAID Card
Why do I keep getting this message? I am not sure what needs to be done to rectify any error. If there is no error and the warning is just due to battery charging, then I would like the warning to stop appearing--or do I just have to continuously click "Ignore"? Any insight into this?
When I open RAID Utility it says: RAID set R0-1 has been mounted with indeterminate data loss. ( Is this just due to improper shutdown?)
Also: Controller reports RAID system 72-hour battery reserve unavailable-System is configured to run without battery.
Message was edited by: Darlyne

I have had the exact same error message. When you open Raid Utility (that is where you can read what "attention" is needed you will see under the "Status" section what happened, and under the "Tasks" you will see the raid card "initializing" your RAID set. The first time I saw this I freaked, thinking that my drives were being reformatted, and my data would be lost. This is not the case. If you look down on the left side, you will (hopefully) see green lights next to your drives. The initialization seems to be a verification of the raid structure -- basically checking to make sure everything is redundant.
So, back to the original question: it seems from my poking around that you SHOULD NEVER TURN OFF your Mac Pro with an Apple Raid Card installed. The firmware is not able to spin down the drives correctly, so when you turn your machine back on, you get the error message we have been discussing.
I would recommend you get a good battery backup (UPS, like an APC) and just power off your monitor when not using your machine. I did not see this in the documentation, I am not 100% sure, but this is what I will be doing. In my case it takes many hours for the Raid Util to initialize my Raid again.
Hope this helps.
Theo

How to change xserve raid-card battery?

how to change xserve raid-card battery?

Xserve RAID Card Battery Replacement Instructions:
http://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/0/MA277/en_US/Xserve_RAID_Card_Battery_DIY Instructions.pdf

Suggestions for removing Apple RAID Card?

After a year of dealing with problematic Apple RAID cards, and replacement batteries – we are ready to move on, without the RAID card.
We have not yet used it as a RAID – all drives operate discretely, non-RAIDed.
We propose to remove the RAID card to eliminate that point of common failure. Has anyone else faced this, done this? Any suggestions, warnings?
TIA for your kind attention.

Hi Michael,
What issues are you having? I had an issue with a faulty battery on a new xserve but once that was swapped out it's been as good as gold. If the drives you have installed have not been raided then you could buy the SATA backplane for the Xserve and swap it out.. Takes about 10 mins to do.
All the best
Beatle

Apple RAID Card - Battery failed (code 0x#0 = 18)

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