[Solved] Problem adding 16TB drives in UnRaid

[BigOne]

I have been using Unraid for about a year with a mixture of 10 TB, 8TB, 4TB and 2TB drives. Unfortunately I have been getting close to the limit of my hard drive space so I decided to splurge on a batch of 16TB drives to replace my 2TB and some of my 4TB drives - Seagate 16TB HDD Exos X16 7200 RPM 512E/4Kn Sata 6GB/S 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch Enterprise Hard Drive (ST16000NM001G)

I had no problems upgrading both of my parity drives but when I put the first 16 TB drive into the array, I started getting multiple errors almost right away. 

I  filled the disks full of data and emptied them all out reorganizing the files on my server with no issues at all.

Then I did preclears with no problems and then added them to the array. There was no problems writing data to the new drives.

However the first time the parity check started running, the drives in the array started throwing errors and the parity check shut down after a couple of minutes.

I have rechecked the drive controllers and verified that they are running the latest IT version of their firmware.

I have tried both xfs and btrfs for file systems for the file share which involved moving files and reformatting every disk except the cache drive pair which are still running btrfs.

 

Attached is the current diagnostics file for the system. I have reconfigured the array with out the parity drives for now but that leaves me with no protection and is not a situation I want to keep for long.

 

I hope somebody can provide some guidance to get this working again.

 

[JorgeB]

Diags are just after a reboot, so not much to see.

[BigOne]

I stopped the array, readded the parity drives and started a rebuild of the parity.

Errors started almost right away.

Diagnostics attached.

 

Edited March 6, 2021 by BigOne
Remove attachment

[JorgeB]

Nothing obvious, I would try again after swapping the 16TB disks to the onboard SATA controller.

[BigOne]

Moved the drives to the onboard controllers and started another parity rebuild. So far there are no errors showing in the GUI but there are a lot of errors in the System Log.

 

Lastest diagnostics file attached.

 

Edited March 6, 2021 by BigOne
Remove attachment

[JorgeB]

That suggests there's some issue with those drives, or a power problem.

[BigOne]

To close this off, it looks like the problem was with the power.

 

It was not that the power supply was too small. I have a 750 W power supply and my UPS says that the computer is drawing less than 250 W.

 

The problem appears to be that due to a lack of connectors on the power supply I had 8 drives per power connector. This was also why the problem only showed up during a parity build. That was the only time all the drives were running at once.

 

I have replaced the power supply with one that has sufficient connectors so that there are only 4 drives per power lead and it appears to have resolved the issue. It wasn't easy finding a power supply with that many separate peripheral connectors.

Edited March 6, 2021 by BigOne
Clarification

[Vr2Io]

33 minutes ago, BigOne said:

only 4 drives per power lead

Always recommend, most people will ignore until they got problem. I always DIY, won't use power splitter.

 

33 minutes ago, BigOne said:

To close this off

👍

Edited March 6, 2021 by Vr2Io