Hi All,

 

I've been trying to retire four old 3TB drives from my array that are older than 5 years (one is 8 years old).

 

So I bought two new 8TB drives and added them to the array then used unbalance to copy all the data off them to these new drives.

 

I had some weird errors last night with one of my 8TB drives reporting some errors (not one of the new ones) showing a pretty scary error. "Input/output error". I did a filesystem check in maintenance mode and everything seemed OK. The data is still there and readable.

 

So before I removed these 4x 3TB drives I figured I'd run a parity check to be sure everything is OK and it's insanely slow. Prior to adding these two 8TB drives I could get a parity done in just over 24 hours. Now it's reporting it will take 186 days.

 

I did a short/long SMART test on ALL drives just a few days ago and they were reporting everything was fine.

 

I copied 12TB from the 3TB drives to the 8TB ones without issue with speed so I don't think it's an issue with SATA cables (I've ordered some replacements regardless)

 

My plan was to just remove all 3TB drives and rebuild parity but I'm starting to rethink that with the current issues I'm seeing.

 

Screenshots and diagnositic file attached.

 

I've got a Unraid sanctioned SATA card  https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B07ST9CPND

 

Any suggestions before I pull the 3TB drives and attempt a parity rebuild?

 

tower-diagnostics-20220601-1317.zip

Your syslog shows continual resets on the 8TB drives - in particular disk6 and disk7.  You should carefully check SATA and Power cabling to those drives.  
Since you have just added some extra drives are you sure the power supply can handle them?

2 hours ago, itimpi said:

Your syslog shows continual resets on the 8TB drives - in particular disk6 and disk7.  You should carefully check SATA and Power cabling to those drives.  
Since you have just added some extra drives are you sure the power supply can handle them?

 

Thanks for responding. I had wondered about the power supply being the limiting factor. She's pretty old too as well as the CPU (10 years)

 

Hopefully newer power supplies have the right motherboard connector for this ancient mobo. I've got newer SATA cables on the way so will maybe start with that and reseat everything well.

 

600W with the following lines used from the power supply which look to be reasonably spread out.

• Line 1 - Parity, Disk4, Disk5 & Disk 6
• Line 2 - Disk 1, Disk 2, Disk 3, Cashe 2 (SSD), Plus tiny LED pizazz
• Line 3 - Ext SSD, Cache1 (SSD), Disk7 & Disk8

 

With disk 7 & 8 being the new ones added. Everything running pretty smoothly prior.

 

Is 600W enough to power this beast?

 

The other option is bite the bullet and get these 3TB drives out of the array and see if it rebuilds parity OK. There is no longer anything left on them so that should help if power is the issue.

 

So I won't hold you to it but it doesn't look like disk failure does it? More a power or SATA cable issue.

Edited June 1, 20224 yr by phoenixdiigital
correction to disk numbers

Look carefully at the picture you posted of the spec sheet on your power supply.

2 hours ago, phoenixdiigital said:

So I won't hold you to it but it doesn't look like disk failure does it? More a power or SATA cable issue.

 

You only have TWO +12V busses and they are limited to 432 watts.  This calculates out to only 36 amperes total.  And this is could be further limited by the power required by your MB, memory and CPU!   (By the way, this is typical specmanship for all PS's!!!)  This PS is probably marginal for your configuration of drives.  (If you go shopping for a new PS, be sure to get one that has a single +12V rail/buss.)

Edited June 1, 20224 yr by Frank1940

30 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

Look carefully at the picture you posted of the spec sheet on your power supply.

 

You only have TWO +12V busses and they are limited to 432 watts.  This calculates out to only 36 amperes total.  And this is could be further limited by the power required by your MB, memory and CPU!   (By the way, this is typical specmanship for all PS's!!!)  This PS is probably marginal for your configuration of drives.  (If you go shopping for a new PS, be sure to get one that has a single +12V rail/buss.)

 

Roger that. I did notice the two busses. It's likely not the greatest PSU for this many drives more so if I plan to upgrade to a newer MB/CPU/Memory I'm going to need a new PSU anyway.

 

Already have my eye on a 850W single bus 12V supply so I think I'll start there and see if that resolves the issues. I'll reseat all SATA cables at the same time. 

 

I don't like doing two things at once because then I'll never know which one fixed it but I want minimal downtime so I'll just let the mystery be.

 

FWIW I ran a dmesg earlier when I noticed most of the drives had spun down. Then I ran it again about 2 hours later. The flood of errors has definitely lessened so power could be the cause... either that or I'm not writing to the array much at the moment.

 

Thanks for the tips I'll report back when the PSU has been updated.

 

Thanks everyone. I upgraded the power supply and 7x of the SATA cables and I'm back on track!!!!

 

Appreciate the fast and useful responses.