2 SAN disks failing during the same overnight period

hard drivestorage-area-network

We have 2 HP Lefthand SAN servers in separate data rooms. Last week each of the SANs had 1 hard disk fail. They were in different positions on the SANs. Both data rooms are very well protected from power issues with UPS.

Any ideas of what could have influenced this?

Thanks, Carl

Best Answer

Several things come to mind:

  1. your disks all share the same environment. If there was ever an event that stressed the disks, all the disks in that SAN were subjected to it. Was the shelf handled roughly when it was assembled, delivered, installed? Was there ever an overtemp event in the datacenter?
  2. Are these disks of the same manufacturing lot? Perhaps they were made when someone had a bad case of the mondays?
  3. When one drive fails, the rest of the drives in that array get stressed because the controller reads / writes like crazy to rebuild the parity. If there were other drives that were already marginal, this sudden change in utilization patterns may push them over the edge as well. As drives get larger, rebuild times get longer, and the problem gets worse.
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