CX4-120 Soft SCSI Bus Error

A single or rare soft scsi bus error is usually not a problem. Once you start seeing a few each day from a single specific drive you will want to open a case with support to have it checked.

On older flare (that was never shipped on the CX4-series) some soft scsi bus errors could be a predictive drive failure (similar to a smart error message about a drive in a desktop, laptop or server), but somewhere around flare 19 or 22 I think that specific soft scsi bus error got it's own 'recommend drive replacement' error code/description.

Hello doyleja2,

The soft scsi bus error generally means that there was a delayed write to the disk.  If you get one or two on a drive there is no need to worry about the drive but you will need to keep a watch on it to see if you get more.  Since you have gotten over 10 of them all on the same disk I would say that the drive might be getting ready to fail.  I would if you have a replacement drive go in to Navisphere or Unisphere and fault the drive manually and then replace the drive.  

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Hi Sam,

We have a hot spare in the CX4, would I be right to assume that if the drive fails that the hot spare will automatically kick in?

I did take a look on the drive and there are under the error's tab the number of errors are all set to 0, if the drive was failing would it not display some error count here? or is there any other way to tell if the drive is about to fail?

If a failure is expected (the array sees a message that the drive is working outside normal parameters or so) Navisphere will send an email about this and log it as such in the event logs.

A soft scsi bus error can also easily occur if the drive has a bad sector (pretty common and this is why drives have 1000s of spare sectors that a bad sector can be remapped to) or even a spike in IO could cause a soft scsi bus error.

Thanks Sam, the drive has since been replaced as DELL confirmed that it was about to fail.