Stephen's Blog

One of the drives in my 3ware 9650SE card recently gave me cause for concern: it randomly began rebuilding and the raid went into degraded mode. There were no SMART errors issued, so I did some digging in the smartcl manual in order to run some self diagnostics. There’s a lot to smartctl to begin with, and the syntax for addressing a drive inside a 3ware RAID is cumbersome. So I thought I’d make note of the useful commands I came up with.

First, to address a drive in a 3ware RAID, pass “-d 3ware,X” to smartctl, where X is a drive number (starting with 0). To list all SMART output for the second drive, for example, run:

smartctl -a /dev/twa0 -d 3ware,1

The -a switch will print out everything. In order to run this on the first (in my case all) four drives, and filter on the temperature output, I run:

for drive in {0..3}
do
    smartctl -a /dev/twa0 -d 3ware,$drive | grep Temperature_Celsius
done

After the aforementioned drive issues, I issued a command to run extended self tests on all drives, like so:

for drive in {0..3}
do
    smartctl -T permissive /dev/twa0 -d 3ware,$drive -t long
done

These tests can be run while online. In order to see the results (including progress along the way):

for drive in {0..3}
do
    smartctl -T permissive -l selftest /dev/twa0 -d 3ware,$drive
done

So far no errors have turned up.