Comments on: Smartmontools and Adaptec RAID controllers

By: fri23368

fri23368 — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 10:53:47 +0000

Hello Rob,

smartmon tools are officially supported on Adaptec Series-2/5/5Z cards.

Support for Series-3 has been added recently but only for specific accounts so this has not been officially validated by Adaptec.

You can download the neccessary firmware here:

http://www.adaptec.com/support/files/

Filenames:
3085_fw_b17335.exe
3405_fw_b17335.exe
3805_fw_b17335.exe
31205_fw_b17335.exe
31605_fw_b17335.exe

Password for all files: phoenix

Regards
Juergen

By: Rob Mangiafico

Rob Mangiafico — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:32:56 +0000

Is it safe to run smartctl tests on an Adaptec 3404 controller with SAS drives with commands such as:
smartctl -t short /dev/sg2
smartctl -t long /dev/sg2

We would like to catch the uncorrectable errors, as the controller is not failing out failing drives automatically, which is resulting in failed stripes in a RAID-1 array many times.

Just want to make sure it’s safe to run tests against the physical drives with smartctl when using an Adaptec 3405 controller. Thanks! Rob

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:50:00 +0000

Patrick, you did not pass any parameter to the -T option.

Try -T verypermissive

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:02:39 +0000

Hi Joel, good point, I’ll try to put together a list of what controllers have which passthrough features. It might take a bit of time as I’ll have to try some of them to determine what is supported.

The latest controllers - series 2 and series 5 - support SCSI and SAT passthrough and will work with smartmontools for both SATA and SAS disks. There is a driver bug which appears when using the latest firmware documented here with a temporary workaround until a driver fix makes it into distributions.

http://linux.adaptec.com/2009/07/24/using-smartmontools-538-with-series-255z-controllers-with-firmware-17380-onwards/

Series-3 controllers support SCSI passthrough but in the standard code as shipped in the channel (non-OEM), do not support SAT passthough smartmontools will work with SAS but not SATA disks.

many thanks, Phil

By: Joel Franco

Joel Franco — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:08:16 +0000

Thank You by this information.

I didn’t know that could be possible to take the information passtrough the raid board.

It could be cool if you publish a table with the raid boards that this method supports; it’s dificul to us, users, to know how to get information from the raid device without open source consolidated tools.

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:44:11 +0000

Hi Patrick, sorry for the delay. I’m not sure about this - I’ll have to give it a try (travelling at the moment so it would be later this week). You could try adding -T permissive on the end. It depends whether the firmware of the 2420 supports the SAT command. If you try - let me know what happens.

thanks, Phil

By: Patrick

Patrick — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:44:34 +0000

Hey, I was just wondering if this was also possible for the Adaptec ASR-2420SA.
Reading the information from /dev/sgX results in this message:

# smartctl –all /dev/sg0 -d sat -T
smartctl version 5.38 [i486-slackware-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=======> ARGUMENT REQUIRED FOR OPTION: T
=======> VALID ARGUMENTS ARE: normal, conservative, permissive, verypermissive

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:13:30 +0000

I answered my own question: modprobe sg and use the /dev/sgX devices instead.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 14:07:16 +0000

Is it possible to use smartctl with a 2420S? If not, what other ways can the health of the individual SCSI drives be monitored?

By: Phil Wilson

Phil Wilson — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:47:47 +0000

Hi Mike, sorry for the delay. The ICP 5085BL is a different model to the Adaptec controllers and doesn’t follow the same model numbering convention. It has higher performance but is based on the same code base as the Adaptec series-3. Unfortunately this code base doesn’t support the SAT opcode as mentioned in my previous note. Consequently smartctl would work with SAS disks but not with SATA.

The controller will still forward any SMART warnings or errors generatedb by the drive to the management software / operating system.

Sorry for not being clearer over the model numbers - I remember thinking it would be challenging when the Adaptec series-5 controllers were launched.

many thanks, Phil