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On one of our servers, a disk failed that was part of a RAID 5. I replaced that disk with one of identical size. However, the RAID does not start to rebuild. If I check the status of the disk with ssacli, it says "Hot plug replacement too small" (see below). Can it be that the new disk is a few bytes less than the old disk? Both show up as 300 GB. The old model is HUC106030CSS600, the new one is EG0300FBVFL. Is there any way to avoid this issue beforehand?

Or if the size is not actually the problem, what could the issue be?

/opt/smartstorageadmin/ssacli/bin/ssacli ctrl slot=0 pd 1I:1:2 show

Smart Array P420i in Slot 0 (Embedded)

   Array A

      physicaldrive 1I:1:2
         Port: 1I
         Box: 1
         Bay: 2
         Status: Failed
         Last Failure Reason: Hot plug replacement too small
         Drive Type: Data Drive
         Interface Type: SAS
         Size: 300 GB
         Drive exposed to OS: False
         Logical/Physical Block Size: 512/512
         Rotational Speed: 10000
         Firmware Revision: HPDE
         Serial Number: W5G5964Y
         WWID: 5000CCA06E09A189
         Model: HP      EG0300FBVFL
         PHY Count: 2
         PHY Transfer Rate: 6.0Gbps, Unknown
         Drive Authentication Status: Not Applicable
         Sanitize Erase Supported: False
         Shingled Magnetic Recording Support: None
jdm
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1 Answers1

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Unfortunately, it's a common issue when using different HDD types and/or vendors. Exact size of the disk can vary for a few kilobytes, but that's enough for such error.

AFAIK ssacli/acucli doesn't show the exact size in bytes. You can try using smartctl, it can read SMART data on disks beyond SmartArray:

# smartctl -d sat+cciss,0 -i /dev/cciss0 | grep "User Capacity"
User Capacity:    250,059,350,016 bytes [250 GB]

The disk number should be specified instead of 0 in 'cciss,0'. Device name can be determined using lsscsi -g.

Most likely, your disks have slightly different size.

Weisskopf
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  • This is why I've started using the disks advertised capacity (rounded down to the nearest MiB) as the amount of the disk to use when creating the array, instead of just using the whole disk. As all disks from all manufacturers must at least provide their advertised capacity. Do take into account the difference between SI units that are powers of 10 and powers of 2 units, like GB vs GiB. – BeowulfNode42 Apr 08 '20 at 01:22