I believe I am looking at some sort of hardware issue, which is extra concerning since a couple of years ago, I recycled some enterprise hardware and somehow against all odds, got it to work. I love it, but now that it's giving me issues, I'm starting to dislike it.

 

The server is a Dell PowerEdge R610. I have it connected to a Compellant SC200 with SAS HDD's in it. 

 

I thought for sure I had to buy a SAS9200-8E and put it into IT mode, in order to connect the disk array to the server, but I can't remember if I actually did that? I thought I did.

 

The symptoms of my issue are the SC200 spins up like an airplane taking off, which is normal, except normally it dials itself back to "normal" after a few minutes, and now it doesn't.

 

I've noticed a solid Amber light on the SC200, which according to the manual, means "Enclosure is turning on or was reset." - however nothing in the documentation tells me what this means! 

 

Part of me wonders if a fan module went bad, because one side feels like intake and the other exhaust - but maybe thats normal and I never noticed before. Every light on the back is green though!

 

Dell manuals for the SC200 keep referring to the Storage Center System Manager, but as far as I can tell, that's the Enterprise Support tool that I doubt I even have. 

 

I have done parity checks and transferred files, and the array itself seems healthy. It just worries me that this thing's fans are going full bore for no reason. 

 

Note:  

• I do have 'dev1 (sdh)' device under "unassigned devices" - this was an HDD that started having bad SMART reports so I just removed it from the Array. It is still physically plugged in though, so it may show up in some logs or reports
• I have 2 other disks unassigned (sdb, sdc) but those were in the server itself as my cache, until I added 2 different drives SSD's for my cache
• I use a 3rd party app called SAS Spindown because it helped with power consumption on these drives - it was recently updated by my troubleshooting but nothing was changed to cause this problem
• No updates happened to any apps, OS, or settings whatsoever when this problem occurred

 

I'm mainly looking for troubleshooting steps, to help me figure out what the amber light on the SC200 might be indicating.

 

 

storage-diagnostics-20240603-1843.zip

8 hours ago, playawhile said:

The symptoms of my issue are the SC200 spins up like an airplane taking off, which is normal, except normally it dials itself back to "normal" after a few minutes, and now it doesn't.

This looks like an enclosure issue, it will be difficult to help unless there's someone else with a similar one.