I replaced the parity disk in one of my systems this week with a larger one. The parity rebuild finished yesterday, but today I noticed that the hard drive activity light for that disk is on all the time (hot-swap bays with individual lights for each disk). However, there is no activity on the drive in the GUI. The light does flash correctly when there is real activity.

 

The following line appears in the logs when starting the array, which seems like it shouldn't be there. I was running a pre-clear on the disk as a stress test even though it wasn't necessary for a parity disk. I did interrupt this operation partway through one of the cycles.

Feb 21 19:51:13 Global-Dynamics preclear.disk: Resuming preclear of disk 'sdr'

 

Also, the unassigned devices plugin has it listed as "in standby" and the option to remove it from the historical devices list is disabled.

 

 

I'm concerned that my parity is reporting as okay when there's actually some silent error going on in the background.

note that some drives have "negative" activity LEDs.

They are always on (if spun up and initialized) and flash if there is real activty.

Manufacturers can save a "power on" LED this way.

So read the manual of the drive, if it is a combined LED, there is nothing wrong with your installation.

 

Huh. Today I learned SAS drives control the lights themselves. Looks like it's configurable too so that's perfect cause it would have really bothered me if this one drive was different than all the rest.

 

Thanks!