SOLVED: What Does a Non-Critical Alert Mean on a Disk Controlled by a Dell PERC H330

As you can see in the screenshot below, we recently found a customer had several of the disks flagged with a triangular yellow exclamation mark (aka: a bang) which was categorized as non critical by the Dell PERC H330 RAID controller.

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This was concerning because the client had just changed two of the three disks that were flagged.

We found the same alert in the Dell OpenManage desktop software and in the Dell iDRAC.

In Dell OpenManage Server Administrator we expanded System Storage > PERC H330 > Logical Connector > Physical Disks. Then to get more detail we clicked on the Full View link at the top and this is what we saw:

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A “non-critical” alert on a disk controlled by a Dell PERC H330 RAID controller typically indicates that there is an issue with the disk that is not immediately threatening to the overall system’s functionality. Here are some common reasons for this alert:

1. Non-Certified Drive: The disk might not be a Dell-certified drive. Dell controllers often expect specific firmware on the drives, and using a non-certified drive can trigger a non-critical alert
2. Firmware Mismatch: There could be a mismatch in the firmware versions between the controller and the disk
3. Drive Health: The drive might have minor issues that do not yet affect its performance but could potentially lead to problems if not addressed
4. Configuration Issues: Sometimes, the alert can be due to configuration issues, such as having different disk sizes or models within the same RAID array

While these alerts are not immediately critical, it’s a good idea to investigate and resolve them to ensure the long-term health and performance of your storage system.

In our case the issues causing the non-critical alert were that the firmware did not match and the drives were not certified supported by Dell.

We did not sell this server and in fact we don’t actually do much with it so we simply notified the client of the problem and moved on because there’s nothing much we can do about it.

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