How often do you do a consistency check on your DSS system?

[webguyz]

Using LSI 9260 with RAID 10 and the default was weekly. Really beats up the system and takes several hours so I scaled it back to monthly. Same thing with the Patrol test that checks the hot spares. What is recommended setting?


Thanks!

[sale_u123]

As far as I know, LSI controllers supports 2 kinds of checking:

Patrol Read
Checking selected (or all) HDDs by reading all sectors. When bad sector is found, data from it is moving to another "healthy" sector and bad sector is marked as unusable. This parameter is reported in LSI MSM as "Media Error Count".

Consistency Check
This is checking of RAID volume integrity. For instance, on RAID5 or RAID6 volumes this checks parity data.

I think that both kinds of LSI checkings are usefull.
I prefer schedule:
Patrol Read on all HDDs weekly
Check consistency (sequentialy, not concurrently) on all RAID volumes monthly

You can change task priority rates in LSI MSM / Set_adjustable_task_rates.
My settings are 20% for both Patrol Read and Consistency Check.
So, it doesn't beats up storage performance, although these check operations may lasts for a day or two...