When attempting to check the health of a hard drive behind a Dell PERC (PowerEdge RAID Controller) or MegaRAID controller using smartctl , you may encounter the following error:
❌ Standard Request: [ smartctl ] ----> [ /dev/sda (Logical Volume) ] ----> [ RAID Controller ] --X--> [ Physical Drives ] Correct Path: [ smartctl -d megaraid,0 ] ----> [ Pass-through Command ] ----> [ Controller Enclosure ] ----> [ Physical Drive 0 ]
By pairing smartctl with the appropriate -d megaraid arguments, you can effectively monitor the individual health, temperature, and bad sector counts of your underlying physical disks without tearing down your hardware RAID arrays. To help tailor these steps, could you tell me: When attempting to check the health of a
Once you have identified the target integer ( N ), test the physical drive query explicitly via the logical device block: sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda -d megaraid,0 Use code with caution.
For environments monitoring array metrics through an InfluxDB stack, configure your telegraf.conf file by breaking out instances per drive slot index: Under this output configuration, your primary disk targets
PD LIST : ======= EID:Slt DID State DG Size Intf Med 16:0 0 Onln 0 1.818 TB SATA HDD 16:1 1 Onln 0 1.818 TB SATA HDD
To overcome this limitation, you can use the "-d megaraid,N" option with smartctl, where "N" represents the logical drive number or the physical drive number on the MegaRAID controller. Under this output configuration
Under this output configuration, your primary disk targets correspond to IDs 0 and 1 . Step 2: Query the Specific Physical Drive
When you run the command smartctl --all /dev/sda (or similar) and encounter the error "smartctl open device dev sda failed dell or megaraid controller," it typically indicates that smartctl is unable to access the disk directly due to the presence of a RAID controller, specifically a Dell or MegaRAID controller. This controller abstracts the physical disks, making it challenging for smartctl to communicate with the disk directly.