On a Proliant DL380 G7, how can I identify which drive in the RAID is making a clicking sound?

I have 8 drives in the Proliant G7, and when under disk load there is a clicking sound from one of them.

There are NO SMART ERROR MESSAGES.

It is running ESXi, which shows warnings about i/o latency increasing (sometimes to multiple seconds) on the HP internal SCSI Disk (this is just the logical disk), but does not provide drive specific information.

I do have the HP custom ESXi 6.0 build running, but there is no error on the SMART flags for any of the drives.

I can audibly hear the drive clicking, and I have a spare ready, but I do not know which drive to replace.

Solution 1:

Are the drives accessible while the server is running? If so, grab yourself a screwdriver and place the tip of the blade on each hard drive. Then place your ear on the tip of the handle and listen for the clicking.

https://youtu.be/U927cYhQXB4?t=39

Solution 2:

You can check status using the hpssacli utility from the CLI on the VMware ESXi host.

Please provide the output of:

/opt/hp/hpssacli/bin/hpssacli ctrl all show config

and

/opt/hp/hpssacli/bin/hpssacli ctrl all show config detail

Edit:

The drive and array status is healthy. The Smart Array controller has a set of heuristics that determine drive health, which may include SMART data, retries, scrubbing, etc.

Disks are consumable. If one fails or indicates pre-failure, let it fail.

You have he LED indicators, vSphere health (assuming you have vCenter), the ILO and you can run the commands listed above.