Before the release of this function, users of RAID systems were forced to test suspected bad hard drives in a host computer individually using a drive manufacturer’s utility. This function tests the health of hard drives with them installed in the RAID unit. DST performs write tests, servo analysis, and read scan tests; the test results are then displayed on the LCD and hyper terminal output. This can aid the user in deciding whether or not to replace a suspected failing hard drive. We highly recommend running this test before initializing a RAID set to ensure a healthy RAID solution.

With today’s RAID subsystems being capable of storing multiple terabytes, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage and maintain that large amount of data. To aid a user in maintaining their data’s health, Arena-MaxTronic has released their newest firmware function Disk Scrubbing. The data and/or parity stored on hard drives can sometimes become corrupted; this data can also reside in areas that are not accessed for long periods of time. DS will use idle time to test the disks, and if a sector is found to be corrupted, the data will be regenerated from other RAID member disks and will be written to an uncorrupted sector. The purpose of DS is to prevent the possibility of having multiple corrupted sectors in a single stripe, which is one of the main causes of data loss.