MegaCLI causes drive "Other Error"

Question

I am having an issue where running "megalci -PDList -aAll" will cause an Other Error to be logged for 2 of the 6 discs in a pair of servers I have. Here is that again in more detail.

I have two Dell R610 servers. Each have 6 discs organizes as follows:

2 x 160gb SATA discs in RAID 1

4 x 300gb SAS discs in RAID 10

When I run megacli commands that check the discs, it causes an error to be logged to the SATA drives. This is true for both servers meaning that 4 drives are affected.

I need two things, I need help finding out why this is occurring and how to stop it, and I also need help making the errors go away so that Nagios will leave me alone. At present I am open to any methods to achieve those goals.

The two servers are on CentOS 6.3 x64. The error occurs whether I use MegaCLI version 1.01.39, version 8.02.21 or version 8.04.07. Here is the output of Megacli -PDList -aAll for the first three drives. This shows the two bad drives and one good one.

[root@nfs1b ~]# /opt/MegaRAID/MegaCli/MegaCli64 -PDList -aAll

Adapter #0

Enclosure Device ID: 32
Slot Number: 0
Drive's postion: DiskGroup: 0, Span: 0, Arm: 0
Enclosure position: N/A
Device Id: 0
WWN:
Sequence Number: 2
Media Error Count: 0
Other Error Count: 1001
Predictive Failure Count: 0
Last Predictive Failure Event Seq Number: 0
PD Type: SATA

Raw Size: 149.049 GB [0x12a19eb0 Sectors]
Non Coerced Size: 148.549 GB [0x12919eb0 Sectors]
Coerced Size: 148.5 GB [0x12900000 Sectors]
Firmware state: Online, Spun Up
Device Firmware Level: 8A22
Shield Counter: 0
Successful diagnostics completion on :  N/A
SAS Address(0): 0x1221000000000000
Connected Port Number: 0(path0)
Inquiry Data:         K85DTA926Y1YFUJITSU MHZ2160BK G2                    8A22
FDE Capable: Not Capable
FDE Enable: Disable
Secured: Unsecured
Locked: Unlocked
Needs EKM Attention: No
Foreign State: None
Device Speed: Unknown
Link Speed: Unknown
Media Type: Hard Disk Device
Drive Temperature : N/A
PI Eligibility:  No
Drive is formatted for PI information:  No
PI: No PI
Port-0 :
Port status: Active
Port's Linkspeed: Unknown
Drive has flagged a S.M.A.R.T alert : No

Enclosure Device ID: 32
Slot Number: 1
Drive's postion: DiskGroup: 0, Span: 0, Arm: 1
Enclosure position: N/A
Device Id: 1
WWN:
Sequence Number: 2
Media Error Count: 0
Other Error Count: 1001
Predictive Failure Count: 0
Last Predictive Failure Event Seq Number: 0
PD Type: SATA

Raw Size: 149.049 GB [0x12a19eb0 Sectors]
Non Coerced Size: 148.549 GB [0x12919eb0 Sectors]
Coerced Size: 148.5 GB [0x12900000 Sectors]
Firmware state: Online, Spun Up
Device Firmware Level: 8A22
Shield Counter: 0
Successful diagnostics completion on :  N/A
SAS Address(0): 0x1221000001000000
Connected Port Number: 1(path0)
Inquiry Data:         K85DTA926W8EFUJITSU MHZ2160BK G2                    8A22
FDE Capable: Not Capable
FDE Enable: Disable
Secured: Unsecured
Locked: Unlocked
Needs EKM Attention: No
Foreign State: None
Device Speed: Unknown
Link Speed: Unknown
Media Type: Hard Disk Device
Drive Temperature : N/A
PI Eligibility:  No
Drive is formatted for PI information:  No
PI: No PI
Port-0 :
Port status: Active
Port's Linkspeed: Unknown
Drive has flagged a S.M.A.R.T alert : No

Enclosure Device ID: 32
Slot Number: 2
Drive's postion: DiskGroup: 1, Span: 0, Arm: 0
Enclosure position: N/A
Device Id: 2
WWN:
Sequence Number: 2
Media Error Count: 0
Other Error Count: 0
Predictive Failure Count: 0
Last Predictive Failure Event Seq Number: 0
PD Type: SAS

Raw Size: 558.911 GB [0x45dd2fb0 Sectors]
Non Coerced Size: 558.411 GB [0x45cd2fb0 Sectors]
Coerced Size: 558.375 GB [0x45cc0000 Sectors]
Firmware state: Online, Spun Up
Device Firmware Level: D1S4
Shield Counter: 0
Successful diagnostics completion on :  N/A
SAS Address(0): 0x50014ee7aab51c32
SAS Address(1): 0x0
Connected Port Number: 2(path0)
Inquiry Data: WD      WD6001BKHG      D1S4WXF1E62KUYR7
FDE Capable: Not Capable
FDE Enable: Disable
Secured: Unsecured
Locked: Unlocked
Needs EKM Attention: No
Foreign State: None
Device Speed: Unknown
Link Speed: Unknown
Media Type: Hard Disk Device
Drive Temperature :26C (78.80 F)
PI Eligibility:  No
Drive is formatted for PI information:  No
PI: No PI
Port-0 :
Port status: Active
Port's Linkspeed: Unknown
Port-1 :
Port status: Active
Port's Linkspeed: Unknown
Drive has flagged a S.M.A.R.T alert : No



enter code here

Since this is a LSI manufactured card re-branded by Dell I can't get Dells help for use of MegaCLI or LSI's help because of the re-branding. My Googling has brought no boons.

Answer 1

Regarding why it is happening, it appears that that version of the MegaCli software issues commands unsupported by SATA drives. You can verify this by obtaining the controller event log:

MegaCli64 -AdpEventLog -GetLatest 100 -f events.log -aALL

After execution, an events.log file will contain the controller error events. If indeed the cause is unsupported commands issued to the drive, your error events should look something like:

Event Description: Unexpected sense: PD 07(e0x20/s7) Path 1221000007000000, CDB: 4d 00 4d 00 00 00 00 00 20 00, Sense: 5/24/00

The sense code of 5/24/00, according to this table of common codes, is "Illegal Request - invalid field in CDB (Command Descriptor Block)".

Answer 2

I found a resolution for this issue.

I finally found a version of MegaCLI 4 and that seems to like my old Fijutsu SATA drives.

In case the link gets obsoleted in the future, the download should still be available on LSI's site if you are up for a little digging - for an obscure reason it is titled "MegaRAID 820X MegaCLI - Linux, Version 3.00.03" and is offering version 4.00.16 as a download.