March 4, 201115 yr I had a missing parity disk. I bought a WD 2TB Black drive and put it into the parity slot. Nada. Nothing I did could get unRAID to even see this drive - it wasn't even seen in the BIOS/POST screen. I removed drive and made arrangements to RMA it. I replaced it with a new 2 TB Hitachi drive. On a whim I checked the WD Black in an eSATA dock on my Windows PC: Drive was recognised, formatted and written to just fine. I put the Black drive in my Sans Digital eSATA 5-bay enclosure, which is part of my unraid array: Drive was recognised. I removed the Hitachi drive from parity services and, keeping the WD drive where it was, made it my parity drive. No problems. I precleared the Hitachi drive and added it to the array - still in the tower where my parity drive usually is. I figured the whole WD Black drive not being recognised was a fluke, so I swapped the Hitachi and WD drives putting the drives where they ought to be. I didn't want the parity drive to be in an external box. Again, the WD Black drive wasn't recognised, no matter what I tried. I had to swap them back. Now my Hitachi drive (disk 13) is misbehaving - failing basically. The drive was running just fine and had a great SMART report. I'm beginning to suspect that the PSU doesn't have enough juice for 12 drives and a slew of fans (8 120mm fans, including the drive cages ones, plus the CPU fan). It's a three x 12V rail Antec 650W PSU. I've had trouble balancing the power loads before. Could it be that when I installed the higher power WD Black drive, it just didn't have the power to spin it up? The problems with the Hitachi drive may be as a result of some power connector changes I made, disrupting the balance on the 12V rails. I'll be buying a single 12V rail PSU I suppose, to eliminate PSU from the equation. Any recommendations for one that I might continue to use if I get a Norco 4220 case or 4224 case eventually?
March 4, 201115 yr Author I ended up getting this "Gold", single-railed, fully moldular PSU: http://ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=53717&vpn=CMPSU-750AX%20A&manufacture=Corsair&promoid=1295 Completely over my budget, but I hope over the years, its efficiency will pay me back in the background.
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