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October 26, 2005

T3 Disk Lights

Q. A Sun engineer replaced the disk in my T3 and now the light is solid amber. Does this mean he used a dud disk?

A. No. It means that the disk is being rebuilt. This can happen in two ways depending on the configuration of the T3. If there is a HotSpare (drive 9) in the array then the rebuild will be fast (simple copy of data from drive 9 to the replaced disk. If the whole array is RAID then the rebuild will take much longer as the T3 is recalculating parity.

There are two lights for each disk. The leftmost light is the drive activity light, the rightmost light is the drive status light.

If the right hand light (drive status) is blinking amber then it means the drive has failed and should be replaced. You should verify this failure using the CLI.

If the right hand light (drive status) is solid amber then it means the drive is being reconstructed or a firmware download is in progress.

If you have reached this far in the diagnostics, the right hand light should be off. If the left hand light is solid green, the disk is OK but idle.

If the left light is blinking (and the right light is off), then the drive is active (or possibly being prepared for removal.

If both lights are off, the drive has not been installed properly.

Posted by Ozguru at October 26, 2005 06:00 AM