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How do you take a physical drive offline using HP P410i RAID card ? Specifically in a RAID1 array I want to use hpacucli tool to take a physical drive offline then online to test if RAID1 array recovers...

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LSI does something like this: offline = "C:\RaidCLI\megacli64 pdoffline physdrv["+drive+"] a0" online = "C:\RaidCLI\megacli64 pdonline physdrv["+drive+"] a0" –  ndawg Apr 17 '12 at 0:21
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If you were using a controller that supported external storage, you could place one drive in a JBOD and one drive in the server. Some PDU's are controllable via the network, which would let you remotely kill power to the JBOD and cause the controller to experience a true drive failure.

Since you only have a P410i, though, you don't have a lot of options. There's no real way to simulate a physical failure like that using software. There are hardware-based solutions, like this one that electrically disconnects a drive's SAS lanes to simulate a hotplug. However, these are likely far too pricey for the limited testing that you are doing. Your best bet is to physically pull the drive.

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You can simply pull the disk and reinsert when you're ready to start the rebuild. There's no need to manually offline the drive through the software.

You should approach the testing in a different manner. Run standard burn-in before deploying. Make sure HP agents and management alerts are in place. Keep hot or cold spare disks around. Use RAID 1+0. You do not need to do this for every server you bring online.

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Actually we are trying to automate a test for this. We have quite a lot of drives to test so do not want have someone to do this manually. its a automation issue basically. –  ndawg Apr 17 '12 at 0:39
@ndawg don't call a simulation a test! physical drive is physical, when you want to test a failure let it fail –  Tabakhase Apr 17 '12 at 0:48
@ndawg - this is not something you need to automate or test. Raid redundancy follows the usual guidelines. You won't be able to do this from software. –  ewwhite Apr 17 '12 at 0:53
We have all kinds of tests.. this is just an experiment but I agrees it is not a real drive failure. We are just auotmating as much of our drive testing as is possible. –  ndawg Apr 17 '12 at 1:01
Also anything can be automated. That is why we are Engineers :-) –  ndawg Apr 17 '12 at 1:07
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EDIT: Let me clarify that this won't simulate a catastrophic failure. This will gracefully remove a disk from an array. As the legendary E. W. White points out in the comments below, there is no (obvious) programatic way to abruptly remove a drive from an array.

You will use the hpacucli tool with the remove command to take a disk out of an array. The command takes the form of <target> <command> [parameter=value]. An example command would be controller slot=2 array A remove

I suggest perusing the HP Array Configuration Utility manuals.

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Thanks that appears be what I need to try. Found this doing a: hpacucli help remove target> remove [drives=[#:]#:#,[#:]#:#,[#:]#:#-[#:]#:#] Provided the feature is available on the targeted controller, the remove command will allow you to remove one or more drives from a specified array. The target can be any valid array. –  ndawg Apr 17 '12 at 0:41
That command removes the disk from the array. It does not simulate a failure. –  ewwhite Apr 17 '12 at 0:42
That is fine. We just need remove a pd and then attempt to take it back online.. it is not attempting to pull the drive physically and check a rebuild occurs which I may have incorrectly referred to in my original question. We are trying to see how robust our RAID arrays are. We have done this manually now attempting to automate. –  ndawg Apr 17 '12 at 0:48
@ewwhite Won't that be virtually the same effect? –  Wesley Apr 17 '12 at 0:48
No. There's no way to programmatically remove a non-spare drive from an HP Smart Array controller. There's the notion of splitting and recombining arrays, but that won't be the same thing as removing a drive. The command posted above deletes a logical drive/array (collection of disks). It won't remove a drive. –  ewwhite Apr 17 '12 at 0:51
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