@ False Disk Health Alerts on HCI? Check Whether Your RAID Controller Is Hiding SMART Dat
  

George Fady Lv2Posted 2026-Aug-07 22:21

Board: HCI | Tags: Disk Health, RAID, SMART, JBOD
If you're seeing repeated false disk-compatibility alerts flooding the HCI Manager console — health checks failing, upgrades and maintenance blocked, and nothing actually wrong with the drives — it's worth checking your RAID controller before you burn days chasing phantom disk failures (we did).
Root cause: the RAID controller was masking the physical disks' SMART data from the HCI firmware. HCI needs direct SMART access for bad-sector prediction and sub-health detection. If the controller is presenting a virtual/logical disk instead of the physical ones, HCI simply can't read that data — and reports it as a health failure instead of "data unavailable."
Fix (pick one, needs a maintenance window):

  • Preferred — JBOD / Pass-Through mode: reconfigure the controller to present physical disks directly to HCI. No RAID overhead, full SMART access.

  • Alternative — RAID 0 per drive: if your controller doesn't support JBOD, configure each drive as its own single-disk RAID 0 array. Keeps minimal RAID protection while still exposing SMART data.


Either way: enter RAID setup during POST (Ctrl+H, Ctrl+A, F2 — depends on your controller), reconfigure, save/reboot, then re-run the HCI health check to confirm SMART data is now visible.
Anyone else hit this on a specific controller model? Curious which ones default to hiding SMART vs. exposing it out of the box.

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Newbie167857 Lv1Posted 2026-Aug-08 13:20
  
Thank you for sharing!
AR Lv3Posted 2026-Aug-07 23:14
  
Thanks for sharing!
Newbie585065 Lv2Posted 2026-Aug-07 22:50
  
Thanks for sharing!