We recently acquired a HP StorageWorks D2D4312 G2. It was running smooth for about 2 months before it started acting strange. We experienced a noticeable decrease in performance and eventually SATA disks started failing. We replaced two drives in about a week but eventually we could not replace them fast enough to rebuild the RAIDs, and lost data. In addition some of the virtual libraries and drives would go offline for no apparent reason. Clearly something was wrong, although the limitied console and GUI made it hard to pinpoint.
We upgraded the software (to 2.1.01) and used the last supported Firmware CD (8.70). No help there. I opened a case with HP and sent a couple of support tickets, and according to them there had been quite a few predicted disk failures going on prior to when the SATA disks actually started failing. So basically they wanted me to download the "D2D G2 Component Firmware" zip-file (version 20110217) and use that to upgrade the Firmware CD (quite an annoying process to be honest, but I'll spare you the details. Let's just say that doing this when you're working remote is more than a little tricky). When looking at the versions it turns out the only difference between the Firmware CD 8.70 and the "D2D G2 Component Firmware" zip-file is the SATA disks firmware version (version HPG1 vs HPG3)
This took care of the problem immediately. Not only did the disks rebuild, and not fail again (at least not yet), but the performance increase was very noticeable (50% in some cases, but some of that might be because we altered the stream concurrency per drive to 1 (down from 3) on our backup jobs in Data Protector). So there you go - it seems like upgrading your SATA-disks to HPG3 is well spent time.
Would just like to share what i went though the exact same process, disks dying faster than i could replace them.
ReplyDeleteAfter replacing 10-12 disks, i havent replaced a single one the last 4 months after the driver update.