Dell and On-Board RAID Controllers

I just learned the hard way that some Dell on-board PERC RAID controllers, in particular the PERC5/i, do NOT have an audible alarm that will sound when the controller card detects an alertable condition. I just found that one of my servers had a bad drive, but have no idea when the drive went bad, becuase the Alarm I configured in BIOS failed to sound. Only after working with Dell to deal with the failed drive did I find out that this particular on-board PERC controller actually has no alarm, despite what the controller BIOS says.

I don’t rely exclusively on the audible alarm for notification when a drive or array fails, but it is a nice fallback plan, and if you’ve been thinking that your on-board controller supports this, you might want to doulbe-check to make sure. Just because there’s an option there in the BIOS to enable an alarm doesn’t mean that there’s actually an alarm supported.