Helping with diagnosis of a problem

[simonsperspective]

Hello,

I'm hoping someone might be shine a light on a problem I've had for far too long. I'm new to UnRaid and recently aquired a prebuilt setup which I'm trying to get to work. It's a 24-bay setup but comes up with millions of errors and I can't work out whether it's the drives that are faulty or one of the components - the thing that's especially confusing is that drives keep on going offline and despite there being 18 drives in it only picks up 12. Errors seem to vary each time I restart the machine and there is no consistency which is making me feel like maybe it's the RAID controller rather than the drives. I've reseated all of the drives, checked PCI connections as well as unplugged and replugged all of the cables.

Please find the diagnostic file attached.

Any help would be much appreciated.

tower-diagnostics-20210125-1700.zip

[JorgeB]

Unlikely to be a disk problem, could be power, controller, expander, etc, I would first try not using the expander, you won't be able to use all the drives but do it for testing.

[JorgeB]

5 minutes ago, itimpi said:

drissssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

lol, did you fall asleep on the keyboard?

[itimpi]

22 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

lol, did you fall asleep on the keyboard?

Keyboard locked on me  

 

[itimpi]

Many BIOS's get upset if more than 12 drives are potentially bootable.  You may need to go into the disk controller BIOS to disable the drives attached from being considered bootable

[JonathanM]

Look for a CMOS entry like "disable int13" or similar.

[simonsperspective]

23 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

Unlikely to be a disk problem, could be power, controller, expander, etc, I would first try not using the expander, you won't be able to use all the drives but do it for testing.

Right. Okay, is my understanding correct that the expander is the one with lots of mini SAS connectors and SAS output whereas RAID controller is what's hooked to the expander? And if so, are you suggesting to unplug the expander and connect two mini SAS cables to the controller itself? That way I can connect 8 drives at a time (2x4)?

 

24 minutes ago, itimpi said:

Many BIOS's get upset if more than 12 drives are potentially bootable.  You may need to go into the disk controller BIOS to disable the drives attached from being considered bootable

In BIOS I can find all of the Hot Plug SATA connections disabled. Not sure if that's what you referred to.

Please find 3x pictures attached which should give a better idea.

 

Thank you so much for responding to this, you can't imagine how much this means.

[itimpi]

2 minutes ago, simonsperspective said:

n BIOS I can find all of the Hot Plug SATA connections disabled. Not sure if that's what you referred to.

Please find 3x pictures attached which should give a better idea.

No - that looks like the BIOS for the motherboard.   The LSI Disk Controller almost certainly has its own BIOS - you probably have to press a particular keyboard combination to get into it’s settings.

[JorgeB]

11 hours ago, simonsperspective said:

Right. Okay, is my understanding correct that the expander is the one with lots of mini SAS connectors and SAS output whereas RAID controller is what's hooked to the expander? And if so, are you suggesting to unplug the expander and connect two mini SAS cables to the controller itself? That way I can connect 8 drives at a time (2x4)?

Yep.

[simonsperspective]

17 hours ago, itimpi said:

No - that looks like the BIOS for the motherboard.   The LSI Disk Controller almost certainly has its own BIOS - you probably have to press a particular keyboard combination to get into it’s settings.

Thank you for your help itimpi. I've looked everywhere but can't seem to get into the Controller's BIOS...

It's Dell Perc H200 H216J RAID Controller and all I found was that CTRL+C upon the usual BIOS screen should allow one to get into it - but with no luck.

However, considering that this setup has worked for the person beforehand and I haven't reset the BIOS I'm inclined to think that it might not be the issue.

Either way, I was looking at your setup and you have the LSI 9201-16i - would that be enough for 16 drives? I think I want to downgrade from the 24-bay I have to 16 for now and invest in bigger drives. If I got something similar to yours would it mean that I don't need an expander and could use just the controller with 4 SAS internal inputs?

 

6 hours ago, JorgeB said:

Yep.

Thank you JorgeB. I've done as you've suggested, cleared the configuration and tested the first 8 drives. There is still loads of errors and now the parity drive comes up with a big red X. Please find the diagnostics file attached.

 

Many thanks to both of you for assisting me with this issue.

tower-diagnostics-20210126-1341.zip

[itimpi]

2 minutes ago, simonsperspective said:

I was looking at your setup and you have the LSI 9201-16i - would that be enough for 16 drives? I think I want to downgrade from the 24-bay I have to 16 for now and invest in bigger drives.

 

Yes - I have 16 drives plugged into mine.   

 

It typically costs about 3-4 times the price of the variant that handles 8 drives but the fact it only took up one slot on the motherboard was important to me.

[JorgeB]

13 minutes ago, simonsperspective said:

There is still loads of errors

That rules out the expander, do you have cables to connect some of the drives to the onboard SATA controller, to rule out the HBA?

[simonsperspective]

8 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

That rules out the expander, do you have cables to connect some of the drives to the onboard SATA controller, to rule out the HBA?

Having said that I cleared the stats and started doing some operations on it and no errors come up. Perhaps it was the expander.

 

17 minutes ago, itimpi said:

 

Yes - I have 16 drives plugged into mine.   

 

It typically costs about 3-4 times the price of the variant that handles 8 drives but the fact it only took up one slot on the motherboard was important to me.

It's important to me as well, that way I can put in a 10gbe ethernet card in and hook it up to the network. I think I might invest in one.