Checking health of drives in a RAID setup

[bejhan]

I have a pair of Western Digital Red hard drives in a RAID 1 configuration via a Vantec NST-400MX-S3R hard drive enclosure. I've been running this setup for ~4 years and would like to verify the health of the drives, in case either needs to be replaced.

JMicron HW RAID Manager software was provided with the enclosure but it does not provide much, in this context, other than SMART information.

Normally, I would use Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostics software to check drive health but, in this case, it would just check functioning of the RAID system rather than each drive individually.

Any recommendations?

The SMART information from the drives is troubling. Maybe I should replace purely based on that?

Attachments

Drive 2

G8sXB.png (25.35 KiB) Viewed 9970 times

Drive 1

xiXPY.png (23.49 KiB) Viewed 9970 times

[fzabkar]

What do you see that is troubling you?

Smartmontools should be able to provide the raw attribute values. These would be more meaningful than the normalised data.

[bejhan]

What do you see that is troubling you?

I don't know much about SMART information so I perceived some current and worst values being higher than threshold as a bad thing.

Smartmontools should be able to provide the raw attribute values.

I ran Smartmontools but it did not provide much information:

Code:

C:\Program Files\smartmontools\bin>smartctl.exe -a Z:
smartctl 7.0 2018-12-30 r4883 [x86_64-w64-mingw32-win7-sp1] (sf-7.0-1)
Copyright (C) 2002-18, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model:     JMicron H/W RAID1
Serial Number:    YM1TDXI5LPYPXJZ5IO9S
Firmware Version: 0958
User Capacity:    4,000,728,481,792 bytes [4.00 TB]
Sector Size:      512 bytes logical/physical
Device is:        Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is:   ATA/ATAPI-7 (minor revision not indicated)
Local Time is:    Mon Mar 04 15:13:51 2019 MST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x00) Offline data collection activity
                                        was never started.
                                        Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection:                (    0) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities:                    (0x00)         Offline data collection not supp
orted.
SMART capabilities:            (0x0000) Automatic saving of SMART data
                        is not implemented.
Error logging capability:        (0x00) Error logging NOT supported.
                                        No General Purpose Logging support.

SMART Error Log not supported

SMART Self-test Log not supported

Selective Self-tests/Logging not supported

[fzabkar]

Sorry, it appears that smartmontools does not support your RAID controller:

https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/Supported_RAID-Controllers

As for the Current and Worst values, higher is better. It is only when these values begin to fall toward the threshold that you need to worry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

[einstein9]

Sorry, it appears that smartmontools does not support your RAID controller:

https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/Supported_RAID-Controllers

As for the Current and Worst values, higher is better. It is only when these values begin to fall toward the threshold that you need to worry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.

On his case, its detecting it as a RAID combined drives not each drive alone (i think) the test he ran was on its Drive Letter (for RAID) not separate drives thats why...

"Device Model: JMicron H/W RAID1"

[bejhan]

As for the Current and Worst values, higher is better. It is only when these values begin to fall toward the threshold that you need to worry.

Thank you for clarifying. In this context, my drives seem to be in pretty good shape.

On his case, its detecting it as a RAID combined drives not each drive alone (i think) the test he ran was on its Drive Letter (for RAID) not separate drives thats why...

The separate drives are not visible to Windows so I don't think there is a way to do this.

Back to my original question, is there anyway to run extended test, etc. on each drive individually?
Or is typical practice to simply wait for the RAID controller to indicate that a drive has failed and swap it out at that point?

I am going to contact JMicron and Vantec, maybe they can be of some help.

Attachments

Disk Management

[bejhan]

Response from Vantec:

Not possible because they are in RAID 1, Individual test may change the data and break the mirror. SMART is a good gauge to see how the drive is functioning.

Just remember, RAID cannot replace backup. It is always good to have a backup. The reason I bring this up is that a customer lost lots of data when 2 drives fail in a RAID5 (4 drives) yesterday and he did not have a backup.

Isn't the whole point of mirroring to have a backup? Now I need to have a backup of my backup?

[LarrySabo]

Remove the drives and test them outside of the Raid.

[bejhan]

Remove the drives and test them outside of the Raid.

That won't mess up the RAID array?

[LarrySabo]

It hasn't for me, but I can't guarantee it won't for you. I wouldn't expect it to mess it up; I've done it several times.

[Alexey]

On Windows, HD Sentinel can often see drives behind the RAID controller, may be worth to check out.

[bejhan]

It hasn't for me, but I can't guarantee it won't for you. I wouldn't expect it to mess it up; I've done it several times.

I e-mailed Vantec about doing this and this was their response:

Very likely it will change the drive and it will NOT be identical and break the RAID1, not a good idea.

Therefore, I don't think I'll risk it.

On Windows, HD Sentinel can often see drives behind the RAID controller, may be worth to check out.

It is able to see both drives! I only have the trial currently it seems like the full version is able to check each disk individually.
Thanks!