Dell PowerVault ME4 Series Storage System Administrator’s Guide

Verify a disk group

If you suspect that a fault-tolerant, mirror or parity, disk group has a problem, run the Verify utility to check the disk group's integrity. For example, if you haven't checked the system for parity inconsistencies recently and are concerned about the disk health, verify its disk groups. The Verify utility analyzes the selected disk group to find and fix inconsistencies between its redundancy data and its user data. This utility fixes parity mismatches for RAID 3, 5, 6, and 50, and finds but not fixes mirror mismatches for RAID 1 and 10. This task can be performed only on a disk group whose status is fault tolerant and online (FTOL). It cannot be performed for NRAID or RAID 0 read cache disk groups.

Verification can last over an hour, depending on the size of the disk group, the utility priority, and the amount of I/O activity. You can use a disk group while it is being verified. When verification is complete, event 21 is logged and specifies the number of inconsistencies found. Such inconsistencies can indicate that a disk in the disk group is going bad. For information about identifying a failing disk, use the SMART option. For more information, see Configuring SMART.

If too many utilities are running for verification to start, either wait until those utilities have completed and try again, or abort a utility to free system resources. If you abort verification, you cannot resume it. You must start the process again from the beginning.