Managing Drives

The LSI Storage Authority application lets you manage all the drives connected to the controller.

The firmware defines the following states for the physical disks connected to the controller:

  • Unconfigured Good – A drive accessible to the RAID controller but not configured as a part of a virtual drive.
  • Online – A disk accessible to the RAID controller and configured as part of a virtual drive.
  • Failed – A disk drive that is part of a virtual drive, but has failed and is no longer usable.
  • Rebuild – A disk drive to which data is being rebuilt to restore full redundancy to a virtual drive.
  • Unconfigured Bad – A disk drive that is not a part of an array and is known to be bad. This state is typically assigned to a drive that has Failed, but is no longer part of a configured virtual drive, because it has been replaced by a spare drive.

    On hot-plug, or discovery during startup, if the firmware cannot communicate with a drive, or drive initialization fails, the drive is marked Unconfigured Bad. A hot-plugged drive might continue to be in the Unconfigured Bad state, if it had Failed previously. The firmware can be configured to remember the Failed drive information.

  • Shield state – The shield state is an interim state of a physical drive for diagnostic operations. The results of the diagnostic tests determine if the physical drive is good or bad. If any of the diagnostic tests fail, the physical drive transitions to a bad state (FAILED or UNCONF BAD).
  • Foreign – While importing disks from a different RAID controller (foreign metadata), the physical disk is marked as Foreign until the configuration on the disks is added to the existing configuration on the controller.

    Foreign is not actually a drive state, it indicates that a drive is derived from another configuration. The foreign drives typically remain in an Unconfigured Good state until they are imported into the current configuration. A Foreign drive is any disk that has a disk data format (DDF) configuration record and is not a part of the current set of configured disks. Even if the disk is removed from the current configuration, it is still considered Foreign until it is imported. A Foreign drive cannot be configured as a part of a virtual drive or a hot spare unless the Foreign configuration on the drive has been explicitly cleared by the user.

    Users migrating the volumes from an old controller to a new controller must ensure that all the controller settings and NVDATA settings that they had earlier on the old controller are present in the new controller because if incompatible settings are found, the foreign import of the drive might fail.

  • Spare – A disk drive that is configured as a hot spare. If the spare is not activated, the status light emitting diode (LED) state corresponds to Online.
  • Copyback – A disk drive serving as a Copyback destination drive. The drive’s state transitions to Online when the Copyback operation completes and the source drive transitions to an unconfigured good or bad drive.
  • Offline – A disk drive that is still part of a configured volume, but is not active now. This state is used to represent a configured drive for which the data is not valid. This state can occur as a transition state, or because of any action performed by the user.
  • Just a Bunch of Disks (JBOD) – Drives that are marked JBOD cannot be part of any configuration because they are stand-alone drives that are exposed to the operating system. Because the operating system and/or applications manage these drives through the controller, it is not appropriate for the firmware to perform RAID operations on JBOD drives. To include a JBOD drive in a RAID configuration, its state must be transitioned to Unconfigured Good. If users enable the JBOD support, the firmware marks new drives as JBOD unless the drive contains a valid DDF record.