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Hi,</div>
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It sounds like you could do a bunch of testing while the drives are still online and visible in GNU/Linux. <span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Calibri, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">I find the most obvious indicator of badness is
things like reallocated sector counts on disks. Usually you can get smartmontools to give you information on individual disks behind a controller with something like:</span></div>
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$ smartctl -a -d megaraid,N</div>
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where "N" is the number of your disk (0-15 i assume in your situation)</div>
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Wikipedia, naturally, has a list of attributes that can indicate failing-ness: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Known_ATA_S.M.A.R.T._attributes">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T.#Known_ATA_S.M.A.R.T._attributes</a></div>
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smartctl will also give you the serial number of the disk, so you could correlate that with the disks as you pull them out.</div>
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Not a silver bullet, but a way to weed out obviously bad disks. I essentially throw out anything that has a reallocated sector count of >0.</div>
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-L</div>
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<div id="divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><font face="Calibri, sans-serif" style="font-size:11pt" color="#000000"><b>From:</b> discuss <discuss-bounces@lists.chicagolug.org> on behalf of L. V. Lammert <lvl@omnitec.net><br>
<b>Sent:</b> Friday, May 1, 2020 5:03 PM<br>
<b>To:</b> discuss@lists.chicagolug.org <discuss@lists.chicagolug.org><br>
<b>Subject:</b> [chiglug] Testing SAS drives</font>
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<div class="PlainText">Getting ready to swap the 2T drives in an MD120 drawer for 3T drives, ..<br>
and I hate the idea of trashing 16 2T drives when almost of them are still<br>
good.<br>
<br>
Having a heck of a time figuring out any option to hang an SAS drive on a<br>
PCI/PCI3 slot so the drive can get tested, as I have not seen any sort of<br>
test option on the RAID controller.<br>
<br>
Any options?<br>
<br>
Thanks!<br>
<br>
Lee<br>
<br>
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