Understanding blinking LED of Hard disk SATA configured in Raid 5

hard driveraid5windows-server-2003

on a HP Proliant ML 350 G4p are installed and configured 4 hard disk SATA in RAID 5 mode. Two of the four hard disk have green LED blinking irregullary, one off and another green LED ON without blinking.

I look for this behavior and I read on HP documentation this info (HP link)

[Online/activity LED (green)] On
[Fault/UID LED (amber/blue)] Off
[Interpretation] The drive is online, but it is not active currently.

I think only two disks are working and then RAID 5 configuration is not complete or do not works well; what is meaning of online respect active in this case?

What do you think about?

2011 02 11 Update:

The operating system is a Windows 2003 server. I use Hp Storage Tool to manage the hard disk of the server.
From HP storage tools I get these informations:
controller 1 (adaptec 2610SA)
Direct-attached devices

Port 0 – Optimal (232,89 Gb)
Port 1 – Optimal (232,89 Gb)
Port 2 – Hot Spare (232,89 Gb)
Port 3 – Optimal (232,89 Gb)

Logical drives (1):
disk – Optimal (465,66 GB)

Best Answer

You should have a configuration/management interface or CLI commands to configure and/or check the status of your RAID system, the arrays, logical volumes and the hard discs.

Could it be that the fourth disc is configured as a hot standby disc and that is the reason why it is off?

Which operating system are you running?

Can you access logical volumes on the RAID?

Related Solutions

Linux Hard Disk Load – How to Monitor Hard Disk Load on Linux

You can get a pretty good measure of this using the iostat tool.

% iostat -dx /dev/sda 5

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s     r/s     w/s   rsec/s   wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util
sda               0.78    11.03    1.19    2.82    72.98   111.07    45.80     0.13   32.78   1.60   0.64

The disk utilisation is listed in the last column. This is defined as

Percentage of CPU time during which I/O requests were issued to the device (band-width utilization for the device). Device saturation occurs when this value is close to 100%.

HP Proliant – Proliant Server Will Not Accept New Hard Disks in RAID 1+0

You may have a spare (replacement) drive whose size in sectors is slightly less than the original drive.

What operating system are you using? We can look at the hpacucli output to determine this for sure.

I will update this answer once we get more information.

Edit:

See my answer on: Smart Array P400i Physical Drive failed after being replaced for the tool download link for Windows 2008...

I'm specifically looking for the output of ctrl all show config.

Edit:

Now that I've seen your hpacucli output, you're in an incredibly rare situation.

  logicaldrive 1 (68.5 GB, RAID 1, Interim Recovery Mode)

  physicaldrive 2I:1:1 (port 2I:box 1:bay 1, SAS, 73.5 GB, OK)
  physicaldrive 2I:1:2 (port 2I:box 1:bay 2, SAS, 72 GB, Failed

Your original 72GB drives were actually larger than 72GB. As you can see, your healthy disk is a 73.5GB disk. HP changes disk manufacturers during the product lifetime, keeping the same spare part numbers. In this case, the replacement sent to you is a true 72GB drive. The rebuild would definitely not work.

The only thing that can fix this one is an equal or larger-size physical drive. Simply send this output to HP and ask for a 146GB disk if you're under warranty. If you're not under warranty, just get a 146GB disk and it'll rebuild as a "68.5 GB" RAID-1 member.

Also, ask for a 10k RPM 146GB disk. Your old 72GB disk is a 10k RPM (which was discontinued in that capacity LONG ago). The HP replacement is a 15k RPM drive.

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