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#Tech Tips# False Disk Health Alerts on HCI? Check If Your RAID Controller Is Hiding SMART Data
  

George Fady Lv2  Posted 2026-Aug-07 22:21

Issue Description
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."


Solution (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.



Discussion
Anyone else hit this on a specific controller model? Curious which ones default to hiding SMART vs. exposing it out of the box.



Board: HCI | Tags: #Disk Health, #RAID, #SMART, #JBOD

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Prosi Lv4  Posted 2026-Aug-10 10:29
  
Hi, If your monitoring system reports a disk health issue, don't immediately assume the disk itself is the problem. The entire storage path is critical:
Physical Disk → RAID/HBA Controller → Driver/Firmware → HCI Storage Layer → Health Monitoring
An issue at any point in this chain can lead to misleading health alerts.
Newbie167857 Lv1  Posted 2026-Aug-08 13:20
  
Thank you for sharing!
AR Lv3  Posted 2026-Aug-07 23:14
  
Thanks for sharing!
Newbie585065 Lv3  Posted 2026-Aug-07 22:50
  
Thanks for sharing!