Then you might want to read the news we received from Dell this week.
If you have bought certain Dell PowerEdge RAID Controllers (PERCs) with specific firmware installed you could experience something called RAID parity inconsistency. Under specific circumstances, this can lead to data on virtual disks to become corrupted.
Some Dell EMC enterprise systems with the suspect firmware have been shipped and were NOT sold with a configuration which meets the criteria and is needed to experience this issue.
However if additional hard drives have been (or could be added in the future) then these systems could be affected.
This issue can only occur if all the following criteria exist:
- The system has one of the following PowerEdge RAID Controllers (PERC) installed: H740P, H840, or H745P MX
- The installed PERC is running firmware version 50.5.0-1750 or 50.5.1-2633
- A Virtual Disk (VD) was created using RAID 5, 6, 50, or 60
- The VDs are created on physical drives which are 512 or 512e drives and are 2TB in size or larger
- And, a customer manually runs a full initialization on a VD. NOTE: Systems shipped from Dell EMC are initialized with Fast Initialization, so this issue will not impact them.
If ALL of the above criteria does exist, then the RAID parity data could be inconsistent. If a physical drive was to fail and be replaced while in this state, then the inconsistent parity would be used to rebuild the failed drive.
This situation could then allow the data on the virtual disk to then become corrupted. Dell EMC highly recommend to run a consistency check on the system if all the above criteria do exist.
If you have a Dell Enterprise system are or unsure if you might be affected, get in touch with us today either through the website or by calling 0114 362 7000 and selecting option 1.
