PowerEdge: Hard Drive - What is Predicted Drive Failure and How to Solve it

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What is Predicted Drive Failure and how to solve it?

Periodically, a Patrol Read is launched on a Virtual Disk. This is a consistency check on the RAID and the hard drives composing the Virtual Drive. 

If the consistency check finds bad blocks, it marks them as bad and reallocates the information to another section of this disk.

A disk is always a bit bigger than specified, so it has room to relocate some bad blocks. This can also be a firmware or a reporting issue so it is recommended to update the firmware before any drive replacement.

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A consistency check on the RAID and the hard drives composing the Virtual Drive identifies "Predictive Failure."

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Perform a backup before any steps are taken.

Perform firmware updates to the Hard Drive, RAID controller, BIOS, and iDRAC to ensure that they are running the latest firmware. This is to ensure that all reporting information is up-to-date and correct.

More information about firmware update is located in the Dell article Updating Firmware and Drivers on Dell PowerEdge Servers.
 
If you are running Dell OpenManage Server Administrator, ensure that you are running the latest version of OMSA. See Dell article Support for Dell OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA)

Solution:

If the hard drive is still showing predictive failure after updates, a hard drive replacement is required.

Export the RAID controller log using Dell articles:

• How to Export the PERC Controller Log using OpenManage Server Administrator-OMSA 
• Export a SupportAssist Collection Using an iDRAC9 
• Export a SupportAssist Collection over iDRAC7 and iDRAC8

Send the log to Dell Technical Support for further review. 

Offline the disk and replace the hard drive.

Replace the drive with a new physical disk drive of equal or higher capacity and perform the Replaced Member operation. The Replaced Member operation copies data from the source physical disk drive of a virtual disk drive to a target physical disk drive that is not a part of the virtual disk drive.

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Predictive Failures can occur due to hard drive errors detected by Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology (SMART) or due to RAID Array errors such as a Double Fault or a Puncture.

More troubleshooting or maintenance may be required to ensure the health of the array.

• How to troubleshoot various Hard Drive, RAID, and PERC Controller issues
• PERC - What Proactive and Preventative Maintenance should be performed on a RAID Array?
• How to Troubleshoot SMART Errors on a Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC)

SupportAssist Enterprise - Setting up Automated Dispatch: SupportAssist Enterprise: Setting up Automated Dispatch - YouTube

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