Check SMART values of disks behind an Intel Raid on FreeBSD

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on October 11th 2013 - Listed in BSD Hardware

In a previous article (check_smart with support for hardware raid controllers) I wrote about checking SMART values of disks behind a physical raid controller on a Linux system. 

This time I needed to do something similar on a FreeBSD server. Different OS, different story.

First I tried to use the basic smartctl command with the output of /etc/fstab for the logical disk, but that did not work:

smartctl /dev/mfid0
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

/dev/mfid0: To monitor disks on LSI RAID load mfip.ko module and run 'smartctl -a /dev/passX' to show SMART information
Please specify device type with the -d option.

I would have been surprised if that worked, but the output already shows a big step towards the solution.
smartctl correctly detects a hardware raid in the background and suggests to load the kernel module mfip.ko, which allows to pass through to the physical hard disks to read their SMART values.

On FreeBSD, a kernel module is loaded with kldload:

kldload mfip.ko

Now the disks appear in /dev/ as pass* devices and can be used with smartctl:

smartctl -A /dev/pass0
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
Current Drive Temperature:     28 C
Drive Trip Temperature:        68 C

Manufactured in week 09 of year 2011
Specified cycle count over device lifetime:  10000
Accumulated start-stop cycles:  19
Specified load-unload count over device lifetime:  300000
Accumulated load-unload cycles:  19
Elements in grown defect list: 0

Vendor (Seagate) cache information
  Blocks sent to initiator = 117160353
  Blocks received from initiator = 546034503
  Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 1489662344
  Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 8567886
  Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 0

Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information
  number of hours powered up = 16603.48
  number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 52

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