Has anyone tried using none 24/7 hr disks on hardware raid ?

I'm toying with the idea of trying this using 2 .1/2" fairly low powered disks and wondered if any one has done this before. The disks might best be described as high endurance ruggedised lap top drives. They are more usually used for robotics and in the automotive field.

All drives will be the same and driven via a mini sas sata raid controller.

Personally I can't see how there can be a problem providing the controller obeys the signals from the drives and also believe that some people have used ordinary laptop disks in server raid arrays.

John
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Actually I meant laptop drives on hardware raid controllers. Cheap skate approach. What I don't know is how well it works out. I just know that it has been done. Sort oh well disks fail anyway.

Now I know what the drives need I found a write up of why

https://forums.freenas.org/ind…support-on-a-drive.27126/

There is a bit more here and an eg of a laptop drive that supports it

https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/i…,_and_what_is_a_device%3F

Disk like most things have evolved over time and that makes me wonder if this area isn't as straight forwards as it was. The storage density on disks has gone way up and I have seen some evidence that drives regularly correct errors via parity corrections. Only one drive but this particular one reports parity corrections separately. It has zero read errors but a lot of parity corrections. This action must have some sort of time out feature. Maybe the time can be set in the controllers - sounds like it should be. My chosen used raid controller hasn't arrived yet so will have to look around for data on it.

Finding manuals on lsi controllers is often difficult. It's this one

LSI00202 LSI Megaraid 9260-8i SAS/SATA 6GB/s RAID controller

I can plug in one of the drives I want to use later today and see if the feature is supported. Also look and see if mdadm has a similar feature.

John

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smartctl -c -d sat  /dev/sdm
smartctl 6.2 2013-11-07 r3856 [x86_64-linux-4.4.62-18.6-default] (SUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org


=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status:  (0x00) Offline data collection activity
                                        was never started.
                                        Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Self-test execution status:      (   0) The previous self-test routine completed
                                        without error or no self-test has ever 
                                        been run.
Total time to complete Offline 
data collection:                (  120) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities:                    (0x5b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
                                        Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
                                        Suspend Offline collection upon new
                                        command.
                                        Offline surface scan supported.
                                        Self-test supported.
                                        No Conveyance Self-test supported.
                                        Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities:            (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
                                        power-saving mode.
                                        Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability:        (0x01) Error logging supported.
                                        General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine 
recommended polling time:        (   2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time:        ( 124) minutes.
SCT capabilities:              (0x003d) SCT Status supported.
                                        SCT Error Recovery Control supported.
                                        SCT Feature Control supported.
                                        SCT Data Table supported.

The drives do support it - sct. Smartctl was turned off initially and it took a while to realise that I needed the -d sat option as the drive was in a usb dock. I've found that there is no need to mount drives the usual way for this sort of thing. Not sure how but the system mounts them and when removed spacefm shows them as empty mounts, also allows those to be deleted. I've also formatted drives mounted this way but when that's done it can be really bad idea to use kde's eject button afterwards. If that's clicked before using open with file manager etc it functions as mount for something else which can be confusing.

Much easier to find data on the raid controller since the last time I used one from LSI. May as well post a link as there are a number of these about.

https://www.broadcom.com/suppo…s&pn=MegaRAID+SAS+9260-8i

Lots of reading to do but the card looks promising. It can even support drive spin down for power saving and also hot fix if the drives support hot plug. It looks like an easy way to extend the number of drives that can be fitted - electrically anyway. Mechanically may be a bit of a challenge. I'm not so sure about 2x 2 1/2 drive to 3 1/2 converters due to cooling.

John
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