enabling S.M.A.R.T on drives attached to Adaptec 2400A RAID controller

[Uwe Doering]

Guido Kollerie wrote:
> In my server I have four 40GB IBM Deskstar 120GXP drives attached
> to an Adaptec 2400A RAID controller in a RAID-5 configuration
> with one of the drives configured as a hot spare.
> 
> According to Adaptec's raidutil utility the four drives do not
> have the S.M.A.R.T. capability for detecting potential problems.
> However according to the IBM/Hitachi datasheet for these drive
> they _do_ have this capability:
> 
>     http://ssddom01.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/E0B26749E1A7728C87256B290055ECA5/$file/D120GXP_ds.PDF
> 
> Is there a way to convince the 2400A that these drives do support
> S.M.A.R.T, and if so how do I enable it?

In my experience the fact that 'raidutil -L all' doesn't flag the 
S.M.A.R.T capability is not really relevant.  I've seen 2400A 
controllers in the past that didn't flag that capability, either, and 
still disk drives (IBM) failed because of excessive S.M.A.R.T errors, 
according to the controller's event log.

I have no idea, though, how to check in advance whether S.M.A.R.T is 
enabled by default in a specific disk drive.  However, there is a check 
box for S.M.A.R.T in the controller's BIOS setup (if I remember 
correctly), and it was selected by default in all cases I've seen.

    Uwe
-- 
Uwe Doering         |  EscapeBox - Managed On-Demand UNIX Servers
gemini at geminix.org  |  http://www.escapebox.net