Xserve raid (14 drive) / several problems

Hi, I have bought a used xserve RAID (the one with 14 drives). It's using 1.5.1 firmware. I have equipped the RAID with 14 WD5000-AAKB-00H8A0 500GB drives.
I first installed 4 drives (slot 1-4), created a RAID array and later on extended the RAID with 10 drives. But those 10 drives never worked without problems.
The problems we have are:
- drive-modules working in slots 8-14 are not working in slot 7
- some drive-modules don't start-up at all. Only red led showing in the front panel.
- The lower controller slot sometimes makes problems, even when swapping upper & lower controller.
Has anybody good experience with this RAID system and can give me some tips what to do?

This is all a bit odd.
You say you have extended the RAID with 10 drives. Bear in mind that you can't create a proper hardware RAID volume across the two controllers/sides of the RAID. You can make arrays over 1-7 then over 8-14.
Did the bad drives ever work? If they are new, have you been in to RAID Admin and made them available for use? Under RAID Admin > Components, click the drives radio button. Do the drives show up here as installed?

Similar Messages

Xserve RAID - Multiple drive failure.

Morning all,
An Xserve RAID I have been called to take a look at is behaving rather erratically! Here's the chain of events over the last 3 days:
(4 x 180GB - RAID 5)
- 2 folders (the largest in size) suddenly appear empty. The capacity and available space do not change.
- Some remaining files and folders appear corrupted / incomplete e.g. Quickbooks company file.
- Data Rescue appear to recover all data, missing files are recoverd as "orphaned" files.
- DRIVE 1 FAILS showing red light and disappearing from RAID admin.
- RAID set shows "degraded" but still accessible due to RAID 5 config.
- Replace drive 1 with 750GB Apple supplied drive.
- RAID 5 set rebuilds automatically showing green and "online"
- missing files in the 2 large folders still appears missing.
- DRIVE 2 FAILS
I believe the chances of 2 drives failing in such short succession are extremely small and I now thing that drive 1 is probably ok and that something else is at fault here.
Xserve RAID is on the latest FW 1.5.1 and no other errors are present.
Can anyone shed any light on this, could it possibly be the controller ?

The act of the rebuild could have been enough to push the second drive over the edge.
I would say... if the Xserve RAID has been running 24x7 since you purchased it, you may want to consider replacing it. The 180 GB drives were discontinued almost 5 years ago from what I recall... 5 years of constant use is really a long, long time for had drives. It's more typical in data center usage to replace drives after about 3 years of use (even if their MTBF is 500,000+ hours, those numbers are rather meaningless). Hard drives fail on a "bathtub curve," where once you get to the far end of it the odds of failure are great, and lots will fail around the same time. You can't rely on the Xserve RAID to run 24x7 for 10 years, or you'll definitely have problems. There is no RAID on the planet you can expect to run for 10 years without issues with the drives... even if you're using $1500 apiece fiber or SAS drives.

Xserve Raid Not Showing all Drives Empty - No Green Lights on Xserve Raid Drives

I have an Xserve Raid. I recently set it up with my Xserve server with fiber cables and now when the Xserve Raid system boots and starts all the drives show as empty in the Raid monitor. Not sure if I have something configured wrong and I think I shut it down incorrectly before I got it hooked up right. When I first got it I was able to see the lights on all the drives but now it boots but no drives show up at all. I have fiber cables to the host Xserve machine and the Xserve Raid plugged into the network with only 1x ethernet cables (not 2 if that makes a difference). When I try to manage the Xserve Raid all drives show as empty even though all the 500GB drives are plugged in. Not seeing any green lights when the Xserve raid boots indicates something is up. I reset the controller cards to stock with the paper clip to factory settings. Does anyone have any ideas on what to try. Anyone have this issue? I haven't found any discussions except one that had a single side of drives go down because of a bad controller card. My Xserve Raid shows no drives at all. Any help is appreciated.

Expansion is a 2 step process: First, you expand the array. Second, you merge the slices. The documentation is clear on step #2, but the GUI doesn't FORCE you to do it. However, it is necessary.
If you did both steps, try rebooting your host and see if it picks up the changed size. It does work... the usual issue though is growing the file system to recognize the additional size. On Linux, I can't help you.

What to do with our Xserve RAID, moving forward - Need Advice.

We have an 3.5 TB Xserve RAID (14 drives - 250 GB each, split into two 7-drive volumes). As many others have, we've moved into more HD and tapeless workflow. The Xserver RAID was purchased really for one HD project with DVCPRO HD back in 2004 and hasn't really been used since except for backup storage.
I'd really like to move us into a SAN system, but am curious about others' perspectives on populating our Xserve RAID with 1 TB or greater drives now or get a different RAID setup. We've moved to Mac Pros, but the Xserve RAID is still dedicated to just one G5. I am doing some reading on setups such as the EVO and CalDigit, but haven't setup a SAN. It's time though.
We have three post machines - two editorial and one sound station. I could really use some insight on how to use our setup in a SAN scenario or what's the cheapest way we can get into a SAN workflow. Granted, drives are cheap these days, but it's so inefficient copying data between two machines to make sure we have a copy of the same media.
Thanks for any input folks.

+I'd really like to move us into a SAN system, but am curious about others' perspectives on populating our Xserve RAID with 1 TB or greater drives now or get a different RAID setup.+
I'll start with the fact that 750GB are the absolute max you'll be able to put into the Xserve RAID. Compatible 750 PATAs are really hard to find (and are expensive when you can find them) so that avenue makes little sense. I think you should really be thinking in terms of new hardware at this point. I know several people who run XSAN and are much happier with the Promise RAIDs they have now over the older Xserve RAIDs.
Which hardware and SAN software you should be looking at I'll leave up to someone with more modern experience in the video editing realm- I've been out of it for too many years now.
My $.02,
=Tod

Raided xserve raid boot volume, OK to run disk utility?

I have been asked to assist another site in our organization, and they have an older g5 xserve and xserve raid. They have the xserve booting off a raided boot volume on the xserve raid (2 drives in a raid 1 config)
They have started having some issues, so I thought I would check the obvious stuff first (i.e. disk util > repair drives)....Just wanted to check here first and make sure that I can SAFELY run disk util on a raided boot volume that is hosted on the xserve raid...
also, does anyone know if diskwarrior will also work in this config? (again, safety being an issue)
Thanks in advance...

Yes, you can run Disk Utility to check the disk, or Disk Warrior or TechTool Pro and any other tool that checks the HD.
That is the point of RAID, it changes nothing of what an OS understands of a HD. If there are any problems and the drive/data is somehow 'lost' it is not due to RAID.
Safety would expect that you ahve a backup of this drive already, so running a disk check would only enhance and not reduce your safety by confirming reliability.
Peter

Drives just stop with new Xserve raid

I have just set up a new Xserve on 10.4.5 with 2 x 400 gig drives.The raid has been set up by the book twice and the drives were formated aswell, the problem is that after the raid is set up i then test it by copying lots of data to it from various machine across the network and after about 10 gigs of copying the drives just stop, on their own(not in a raid) the drives work fine.
Any suggestions ?
Thanks
Matt

Hello, Diego Arana and welcome to the AppleBoards,
+I don´t know what OS the Xserve RAID has, I just know that it is the first one.+
The Xserve RAID has no operating system on it. It is essentially a very fancy external hard drive that attaches over fibre channel. It does a firmware version that can be updated but that is the closest thing to an OS that it has. (Unless you're adding drives you can probably leave that alone.) The XRAID is controlled over either of the ethernet ports using the RAID Admin program - if you don't have a copy download it from Apple's support site.
+Is it possible to connect a New MacPro (Early 2009) to a Xserve RAID (RAID 720G/4DRIVE/2X2GB FC) via fiber channel?+
Yes, I have done this and it is straightforward. The fibre will negotiate down to 2GB, of course, but it does just work. If you're talking about the Apple shipped fibre card it is (at least in the states) shipped with SFP connectors that match the SFP connectors that are on the Xserve RAID and you just use the copper cabling (not the optical fibre) to connect them unless you are going a very long distance. If you order the card (again in the states) with Xserve the copper cables are included when they ship it.
If you do have optical connections you can buy optical to copper/SFP converters. I have several of these on my fibre switch and they are not more complicated than adding the adaptor and plugging them in - at least on the fibre switch. I have never actually hooked up an XRAID to optical fibre but this is pretty common in XSAN environments with longer "cable" runs.
HTH,
=Tod

Problems with Xserve RAID

I have been having problems with Xserve RAID, which happened in a close time span, but may not be related. The Xserve RAID is set up with 7 disks with RAID 5, totaling to 1.3TB in storage capacity.
First, the first disk failed and the RAID system was degraded. Since I got a very similar 250GB harddisk (but without "Apple Firmware") I tried putting it as a replacement. It was recognized but it became a hot spare disk, even though I did not set the system to use hot spare.
Later Mac OS X reported that the Xserve RAID's 1.3TB volume was unmounted. I check with Disk Utility, and it reported a lot of errors. I ended up with about 70GB of files in lost+found, and I confirmed that many files were missing. Disk Utility could not really fixed it.
I put back the failed disk, and Xserve RAID successfully rebuilt the array. I did "Background Array Conditioning" to perform surface scan and mapping of bad blocks. It completed without error. I then did "Verify Parity Data", and it completed but with error, as follows:
Event:
Disk 5 Reported An Error. COMMAND:0x37 ERROR:0x64 STATUS:0x81 LBA:0x119E6880
Description:
The drive reported ATA error. This is a failure in the communication from the RAID Controller to the drive.
Any idea what is happening with this Xserve RAID? Bad disk? Bad controller? Or what? Any help is appreciated.
Thanks,
Xserve RAID Dual G5 2.0GHz Mac OS X (10.3.9)

After reading here and there on the net (including this forum), yes I realized that the "Apple Firmware" thing may be significant after all. But since I set the Xserve RAID to use RAID 5, a failure of one disk should not affect data integrity. And surface scan was successful, implyingthat all disks are now free from defects. So why did it lost 70GB worth of data? I experienced disk hardware failure often with Windows system but never experienced losing data while the hardware seems to be fine. Without knowing why this happened, I feel scared to put data on Xserve RAID, and this is ironic since this 1.7TB Xserve RAID is meant for storing data safely...

Dropped frames on Xserve RAID upgraded w/750GB drives.

I'm capturing in 10-bit uncompressed standard definition 720x480. I just upgraded one side of my Apple XRAID, (connected directly via fibre channel) with seven, 750GB hard drives from Apple, drives designed for the XRAID, (came with there own sleds.)
Current Xserve RAID firmware version is at version 1.5.1/1.51c
Before the upgraded drives, no issues with dropped frames, (drives 1-7) the other side of the same RAID has no problems, (currently running 250GB drives, drives 8-14.) All sleds are populated with drives of the same capacity, (respective to each side.)
The drives were formated using the Xserve RAID Admin software and mounted using Apples Disk Utilities, Journaling turned off. The final formated capacity of the RAID on drives 1-7 is 4.1TB.
When I capture to the drives on the upgrade side, I get dropped frames. When capturing to the other side, no issues, works great. I checked the settings for performance and they are the same for both sides, as follows:
Use Controller Write Cashe - ON
Allow Host Cashe Flushing - OFF
Use Drive Write Cashe - ON
Use Steady Streaming Mode - OFF
Read Prefetch: 128 stripes (8 MB/disk)
My capture box is an AJA I/o and has never given me dropped frames till now, but only on the side of the RAID that has the new 750GB drives. I also have another RAID that uses 500GB drives on both sides and it work just fine as well, (no dropped frames) using the same performance settings in XRAID utilities.
Any suggestion on why these new Apple drives modules are dropping frame would be very much appreciate. Again 7 new 750GB drives from Apple w/sleds having dropped frame issues.

I'm capturing in 10-bit to avoid loss of quality from analog sources like BetaCam SP as well as line 21 must be part of the captured file, because it contains line 21 for captioning. Eight bit has a banding issue that I can't have in the final product and 10-bit doesn't have this issue.
Source quality is maintained completely when working in 10-bit uncompressed, as well as the captioning data that I need, which is stripped out of the captured video latter. Captioning software can read line 21 of the raster area, of the captured file.
Source video is from BetaCam SP, DVC Pro and DVCam.
The RAID is an Apple Xserve RAID, connected via Fibre channel directly, (no xsan.)
I also create high quality QuickTime Streaming files from these source files, the higher the quality of the source video the the better the streaming files look when created.
I have never had any problem capturing till I installed these new drives from Apple.
The RAID is as stated above, is an Apple Xserve RAID, connect via a fibre channel card in a Mac Pro 3.0GHz tower, (no xsan is used, due to connecting directly to the XRAID.)

XServe Raid won't mount after drive replacement

We had a drive go bad on an XServe Raid. We replaced the drive. It went through the rebuilding process. Now we can't mount the raid. The verify in the disk utility is successful but it still won't mount. What are we missing?

I have managed to fix the problem (at least it's still going at the moment...). We were just about to return the Fiber Card to Apple, but just before I removed the card from the G5 I had one last look at the settings on the RAID. Previously I had noticed that LUN Masking was on. I didn't take much notice of this before, as I read in an Apple manual somewhere that LUN Masking is always on while the Xserve is initializing the disks. As a last resort I thought to try and force LUN Masking to be disabled. I changed the array to JBOD, so the disks wouldn't be initialized, and entered the advanced settings. I then went to the LUN Masking section and turned off masking for both controllers. I then shut down the Xserve and unplugged it for 10 minutes.
I then turned on the Xserve and the G5 and to my utter delight, the G5 said "Unrecognized disk inserted"! The G5 was finally seeing the RAID.
I then formatted the RAID and everything has been fine since (4-5 hours).
I have no idea how LUN Masking turned on, the masking list had no devices in it, so the RAID was basically disallowing anyone access through fiber. Upon turning masking off, the RAID reappeared on the G5. Apple support said nothing about LUN Masking when I on the phone to them. I guess they though resetting the RAID controllers would reset the LUN Masking, but it doesn't seem to. I repeat: Resetting the RAID controllers does not reset LUN Masking.
All along this was the problem, but no-one at Apple or the reseller we purchased the Xserve RAID from thought of it!
I hope this helps someone out there.
Elijah
PowerMac G5, PowerBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.6) G5: 1.8Ghz 1Gb RAM Geforce 6800. PowerBook: 100Gb HD, 1.25Gb RAM

Cannot map or even see drives on xserve RAID hanging off a xserve

Sorry if I sound like a complete idiot, but when it comes to Macs I am one. We have a OS X Server 10.5.8 and a xserve RAID. The RAID looks ok and under the server I can see both of the RAID drives that have been created and access them. When we try to map to it on one of our house Macs, its errors out with "There was a problem connecting to the server." When we try to map to just the root of the server, we can see its hard drive, but not the RAID drives. Any help would be most appreciated!

By default, Mac OS X Server only shares the root drive.
In order to share external volumes (such as the XServe RAID volumes) you need to use Server Admin to mark the volumes as shared (as well as which protocols to use).

Copying between XServer RAIDs problem

I have two XServer RAIDs connected through a fiber switch to an XServe G4 1.33GHz running 10.4.3.
When I try and copy a folder of about 3,000 files (1.27TB) from one RAID to the other, I get a few hundred of the files and then the drives disappear from the desktop and the copy fails. I have to restart the XServe to get the drives to show back up. Any ideas?

The switch is a Vixel Emulex 355 12-port. The ports are not disappearing. The only thing I have to do is restart the server to get the RAIDs to show backup. I have tried restarting the RAIDs and the switch, but it seems to be a problem with the XServe. Wonder if the Fiber Card in the XServe could be having a problem? That is a LSILogic LSI7202P Firmware 0.0.0, Fcode 1.00.29.

Capturing Video To Xserve Raid problems

I recently purchased an Xserve raid (1.75TB with 512mb cache on each controller), set it up for Raid 5. I also have an Apple Fibre Card on Slot 4 (the fasted PCI-X slot on my dual 2.0 G5. Much to my surprise when capturing DV video, not HD or DVCPRO, simply DV video via FireWire 400 to the Xserve Raid it can't keep up and drops frames! When I caputure DV video via FireWire 400 to my internal 150gb SATA drive all is well.
I do have journaling turned on for the Raid, but that can't be the problem.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
thanks

Hi there,
I’ve been reading numerous posts by you on the Apple Discussions pages and was wondering if you could help me.
I work for a small video company with 1 G5 Quad, 4 Dual G5’s and a G5 Imac. We have always worked across a gigabit network, sharing media and projects from each other’s internal and external drives without any problems. However, it was very hard to keep track of what everyone was doing and it was often hard to find specific files.
Therefore, we decided that it would be a good idea to centralise all of our storage, so we invested in an Apple Xserve Raid, which we connected to one of the dual processor G5’s (which we installed 10.4 server software on) via fibre channel. We figured that we would all be able to access the raid (just like we access each others internal and external drives) and read the media across the network. However, this has not gone to plan!
I followed the instructions about how to initialise and setup the raid and striped one bank of 7 as Raid 0 (set as our Projects drive) and the other bank as Raid 5 (set as our capture scratch). It does work ok for the most part. The G5 that hosts it works perfectly and most of the time one or maybe two of the other G5’s work well, but on the whole we are dropping a lot of frames and images are freezing frequently.
My understanding is that all 6 of our edit suites should be able to read DV across the gigabit network and as I have said, this has been the case before we got the raid – which leads me to think there is something, not right with the Raid. I could be here all day if I were to explain all the network settings on each computer, as well as what settings the Raid is set to – and to be honest I wouldn’t even know where to look!
I don’t know if I made this clear, but we capture locally and move the footage across – the project files and render files are also saved on the raid! We are not trying to work from the same project files, just the same media – but not all the time!
I really need to understand why we are having so much trouble and any help would be greatly appreciated?
Kind Regards
Adam

Xserve SSD OS drive Raid 5 array - What if SSD OS drive is corrupt or fails

Xserve SSD OS Drive option with Raid 5 array - What if SSD OS drive fails or the OS becomes corrupted? Could you just re install the os and then upload all of your server settings and it would be able to talk to the raid array and be good to go?
Additionally if the os is in the raid 5 and becomes corrupted and you are not able to get the os to boot would the raid 5 data not be able to be accessed? Or could you just reinstall the os on the array and be ok?
This would be the same if the os is inside a software mirror set?
Thanks in advance!!!

Hi
If you're asking can OSX Server be reinstalled without a reformat the answer would be no. This assumes you're using the OSX Server Installer DVD. Assuming no other hardware issues you should be able to access any/all data on any of the Drives using Target Disk Mode and another mac. This will at least allow a transfer of important data to another source. Having said that you should be keeping back-ups anyway.
You can export Server Admin's configuration as a series of property lists. You can export Users, Groups and Computer Lists from WorkGroup Manager. You can archive the whole of the LDAP database - which will contain everything except home folder information - using Server Admin.
I'm not sure if this is still the case but one of Apple's Best Practice tips was to setup and configure the Server exactly as you wanted it first. Once you're happy use any one of probably half a dozen methods to make a Bootable cloned backup. A free built-in method would be to boot from an appropriate Installer Disk and save the Server OS as a .dmg to a connected USB or Firewire disk. Or use something like CarbonCopyCloner to do regular scheduled clones to an externally attached drive.
My 2p.
Tony

Which 750GB drives used in an XServe RAID?

Could somebody with an XServe RAID with 750GB drives please tell me, which drives are used in this configuration? You can look it up in the XServe RAID admin utility, under Arrays and Drives when selecting a drive in "drive" mode.
Thanks a lot,
Floh

ST3750640 NA P
Revision 3.BTF
it is a seagate

What's the best place to start troubleshooting my Xserve RAID problem

Hello all,
I have an older 2.5tb (ide drives) Xserve RAID connected to an HP workstation, which is a video editing sytem. The fiber card connecting the raid is an LSI 7202XP PCI-x card.
I'm using Windows XP Pro. Nothing on the hardware or software side has been updated or changed in years.
Recently, I'll be editing video and the Xserve RAID will just "disappear". A computer restart will usually restore it.
Where's a good place to start troubleshooting? I was going to replace the fiber cables, then the fiber card...then I don't know what.
I'm just an end user/video editor, so any maintenance help is appreciated!
Thanks,
Jason Kalinoski
Tallahassee, FL

Normally, it should take less than an hour @ $90 USD for labor to replace one. The HD cost is additional. Why do you think the HD needs replacing? Too small?.Then I suggest an ext FWHD, w/FW800 connector, rather than replacing the int one. If there are issues with the HD, check out the iMac HD replacement program. You should really know when you bought the machine and, IMO, it should have the AppleCare Protection Plan, which is the cheapest insurance policy for desktop machines.

Xserve raid (14 drive) / several problems

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