SInce last month, our Nexenta based storage cluster has been deployed and I have now moved production data onto it.

A bump and bruise occurred last weekend (I had done an announcement already) and yesterday things burped again.

The problem? Looks like an issue with the 2 mirrored boot drives of the first head unit (each head manages its own volumes and HA is used to make sure a single head failure doesn’t cause an outage) are … bad.

One drive has full on SMART failure via the BIOS. Interesting…so replace that drive with another from the shelf…and the other drive is showing something ‘odd’. Yank it out, replace it, and move it another machine for testing.

And it is failing as well! Four hard disks, 2 per head unit, and 2 fail in one head unit, what are the chances of that? (the second head unit does not exhibit any of the same symptoms)

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