Doesn't work on supported controllers?

[anderskvist]

I just found HDSentinel and are considering deploying it to all our servers if possible, but it doesn't find disks even tough the controllers are supported?

Code: Select all

HDD Device  0: /dev/sda
HDD Model ID : DELL    PERC 5/i
HDD Serial No: ?
HDD Revision : 1.03
HDD Size     : 277503 MB
Interface    : SCSI
Temperature  : Unknown °C
Highest Temp.: Unknown °C
Health       : Unknown %
Performance  : Unknown %
Power on time: 
Est. lifetime: 

Code: Select all

HDD Device  0: /dev/sda
HDD Model ID : DELL PERC H700
HDD Serial No: ?
HDD Revision : 2.10
HDD Size     : 341759 MB
Interface    : SCSI
Temperature  : Unknown °C
Highest Temp.: Unknown °C
Health       : Unknown %
Performance  : Unknown %
Power on time: 
Est. lifetime: 

Both controllers are listed here: http://www.hdsentinel.com/compatibility ... ollers.php

/Anders

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message and question.

As you can see on the to of http://www.hdsentinel.com/compatibility ... ollers.php page:

"The following list contains the list of hard disk controllers tested and compatible with the Windows version of Hard Disk Sentinel. Under DOS or Linux some hard disk controllers may provide more or less information."

Under Linux things are different - so it is possible that only partial information displayed, depending on the differences of the OS and drivers for the actual controller.

The Linux version is being updated (the current latest is a bit old) - the updated version may be able to provide further hard disk information with this controller.

[anderskvist]

Yea, I saw that when I read it after posting this...

Would be great with a updated version - any ETA?

I can see that you suggest users to buy the Windows version to support, why not just have an option to donate? We'd sure like to support if we can use the tool to monitor our disks, but we don't have Windows, so we cannot use it anyways...

/Anders

[hdsentinel]

Thanks! As the updated version for Windows just released, now we can focus on the Linux version
I can't promise actual date (I do not like that - as something can always happen) but will try the best.
I can make sure that the released version will be published on www.hdsentinel.com website, facebook, twitter etc.. as soon as possible.

Thanks for your suggestion!

Personally I thought it may be better to support development by buying something which you can give to your family members, friends, colleagues - or just keep them as "it can be useful one day" (for example if you order a Hard Disk Sentinel Pro license which can be used with the Portable version from a pendrive) when you ever require on a Windows system.

This way you'd have something immediately - and the development is also supported this way. IMHO may be better than a donation... (maybe just send also a mail to info@hdsentinel.com that this particular order placed to support Linux development )

But if you have the opportunity to support development by other ways (eg. with special hard disk (RAID) controller, faulty or not perfect hard disk drives / SSDs for investigation - or some amount sent with Paypal) that support would be welcome as well

[carobell]

I'm bumping this question up.

I've been trying to find a way to check the health of my servers and thought, since HDSentinel is great on my Windows machines, it would work on my Linux ones too, but I find myself bummed out that I cannot get any info on my raids. I am trying to figure out if I'm not configuring something or making a mistake somewhere but info is hard to get for this version....

Will the linux version be updated for raid controllers any time in the future ?

Also Is there a comparison of what the linux version can do compared to the windows one ?

[hdsentinel]

Without knowing the actual situation, it is hard to say anything for sure.
Generally yes, the Linux version is also improving and support for controllers added - just this is (much...) slower than the Windows version.

Please at least mention the Hard Disk Sentinel Linux version you tried, the Linux distro you used, the RAID controller you tried, disk types and so.
The best is always is to save a report with -r switch and send in email to info@hdsentinel.com and then it is possible to check the actual situation.

No, I'm afraid there is no comparison available, it is impossible to make due to the extremely high number of combinations of Linux distros, RAID controllers and drivers used by the Linux for these. Many times the drivers limit our possibilities (regardless of OS). I mean if the detection is possible under Windows by the Windows version of Hard Disk Sentinel, it may not mean that things are working under Linux too - as the Linux driver may miss some functions/features and generally work completely differently.

This is exactly why the Linux version is available for testing - and if things do not work well, the report always help to check the results and verify the possibilities.

In the latest Hard Disk Sentinel Linux version, many RAID controllers added and supported with LSI chipset, including LSI / Dell / IBM / Intel RAID controllers, so the detection may work properly with these - but this depends on the Linux kernel / distro too.

[carobell]

Thank you for the fast answer!

I'm sorry I messed up my question, after more playing around I figured out that it might be the disks used that have a problem.
I used the current version of HDSentinel available on the site, I cannot say what disk exactly but they are all SAS disks. The server I used to test it was a Dell PER710 with ubuntu 16.04.
HDSentinel was able to give all information about any SATA drive I added to the server. That's how I figured it's the disk and not the raid controller.

None of the SAS disk have any information on them but the SATA have all the information I need.
Disk 0 to 2 are SATA, 3 to 5 are ISCI.



There are actually 8 disk in there, but found out two were dead, at least I know those ones are not in perfect health...

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for the information, the image and the details !

Yes, I forgot to mention that on Linux, only the SATA hard disks can be detected if connected to these controllers.
Under Windows (due to completely different OS, driver and access methods we can use) it is possible to access the status of both SATA and SAS drives too (even if configured as RAID) but under Linux, we have only status of SATA hard disks, as you can see.

Maybe if you have the opportunity, I'd recommend to try a bootable live Windows pendrive/DVD, boot the system from that and start Hard Disk Sentinel Pro Portable under that. This way the Windows version may be able to detect the currently missing details and show the complete status of the SCSI (SAS) drives too in addition to the SATA disks.

[Eric]

Team, I noticed this respond is for a year ago. is there any update or news about SAS HDD on Linux version? I can view SATA and SSD disk behind Hardware Raid, but only SAS cant view.

Highly appreciate if you can do something about it. i love your app. its awesome and very helpful.

[hdsentinel]

Thanks for your message.
No, I'm afraid (as this is limitation of the Linux driver) under Linux SAS drives can't be detected on this DELL PERC controller.
Did lots of investigations and tests, but found no solution until now. Sorry....

[Eric]

Noted and appreciate your update on this. and thanks again for such handy application.

cheers

[jamietre]

This thread is very old but seems like the right place to discuss. I've recently migrated my home server to Ubuntu and was disappointed to find it doesn't work with the one device I really care about, a Mediasonic HFR-SU3S2 hardware RAID. This uses a JMicron chipset and is an SATA device. Is there any possibility of future support? The discussion seems to indicate it's not necessarily ruled out by lack of driver support.

I'm now able to use a VM for everything else I still need to do with Windows, really just a couple business applications, but of course HD Sentinel won't work in a windows VM. So I'm keeping a Windows partition installed for the sole purpose of booting in Windows to check the raid's health once in a while . If there's any info I can provide from my system to facilitate this possibility I'm happy to do whatever I can.

[hdsentinel]

Yes, this is true: by default (mostly for safety purposes) the Linux version does not automatically attempt to detect disk status information with hardware RAID enclosures built with JMicron chipset.

Generally based on the JMRaidCon library an extension made for Hard Disk Sentinel. By using that, in theory, the status information can be detected about disk members.

This tested on several systems/enclosures and on most of them, everything worked perfectly. But in one case, we found that it resulted the RAID array to break and the complete information stored on the drives lost.

This does not happen under Windows version of Hard Disk Sentinel, which uses different methods to detect status - but under Linux, things are different.

Because of this, I decided to not put it online - but offer on request, but with caution: use it only on your own risk!
As the JMRaidCon is not officially supported by JMicron (and not my work), I can't guarantee the success.

If you prefer, you may try:

1) download the file
www.hdsentinel.com/hdslin/detjm.tar.gz

2) extract the file to the folder where the Linux HDSentinel placed, so the file detjm should be there.
Set the permissions of detjm to executable (chmod 755 detjm).

3) launch HDSentinel as normal. If required, it will invoke the detjm external module to perform the detection of the disk information.


If I'm correct, the status of all drives should be detected and displayed.

For testing, I'd recommend to start this way:

./HDSentinel -test -r rep.txt >out.txt

and send the created rep.txt and out.txt

These would allow me to check the status information, verify the response of the chip and check if further changes would be required or not. These files would especially helpful if something is not perfect.

Also if you see jmbinfo.txt and jmbinfoX.txt
(X = 0 .. 4, the drive positions accessed) files created too, please send them, as then I can examine the "raw" response of the JMicron chip, check what the software got from the chip when tried to access the drives on the appropriate positions.

[jamietre]

For testing, I'd recommend to start this way:

./HDSentinel -test -r rep.txt >out.txt

I did this before installing detjm.tar.gz - if you meant I should do this AFTER let me know. Will send you a link to the output directly; I'm not sure if there's anything in there that might be considered private.

The notion that checking the status this might crash the array is, er, slightly intimidating but i do actually have a hot backup (my old, smaller array) so I might be not a bad candidate to test it. It wouldn't be the end of the world but it would take a very long time to restore if I had to!