Hello   OMSA can be used to see what is currently configured and to change the configuration. Under the main Storage section on the left pane you will see the controller wide tasks. One of the drop downs is to change the patrol read behavior. You can also view the current setting on that screen.   Patrol read is a sector check. It tests the physical sectors and marks bad sectors so that they are not used. If it locates a bad sector it will rewrite the data to a good sector. By default the controller runs patrol reads every 7 days. A consistency check is a data integrity check. It will check the data on the array to make sure it matches. If a mismatch is found it will correct the inconsistency with available redundant data. Consistency checks are not automated. It is recommended that you run them once a month. You should expect a 30% performance reduction when a consistency check is being performed. In short, patrol reads are physical checks and consistency checks are logical checks. This document is old, but it is still relevant to explain patrol reads: [URL] Thanks
I have an R710 and an R420 both running ESXi 5.5. I also have an R310 running Windows 2012 R2 for running vCenter. The R420 has a PERC H710 with a RAID 5 array. I can see from the iDRAC 7 web interface that the controller is running weekly patrol reads. The R710 has a PERC H700 controller with a RAID 6 array. It only has iDRAC 6, so I can't tell if patrol reads are being performed from the iDRAC web interface. If this was a Windows server, I would install Dell OpenManage and check from there. Question 1: What is the best way, on an ESXi host, to see if patrol reads are set up, and how can I set them up? Question 2: Are patrol reads enough to ensure data integrity / prevent bit rot? Or is there some other consistency check that I should be doing?
Patrol Reads on ESXi Host