This one's a doozy - unRAID tower has been working fine for well over a month now; no new drives added for at least two weeks, and multiple shut-down / start-ups since.  Literally nothing has changed (to my knowledge) since my last no-problem boot.

 

The build conforms 100% with rajahal's 20-Drive Beast tower, with 15 Data Drives and 1 non-array Cache Drive.  Controller 1 has 8 data drives; Controller 2 has 5 data drives.  Parity, Cache, and 2 data drives connect directly to the motherboard.

 

Controllers: Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 8-Port SAS/SATA Add-on Card x2

Hard Drives: Toshiba Coolspin 2TBs / WDEARS Green 2TBs

 

When I hit the "Marvell 88SE63xx/64xx Adapter - BIOS Version 3.1.0.21" screen, I get the following:

 

Resetting Controller 1... [OK]

Initializing Controller 1

Spin Up Group 1 [OK]

Detecting Port 2 [FAILED]

!ERROR: PD Not Ready or Unknown Device Type

Detecting Port 1 [FAILED]

!ERROR: PD Not Ready or Unknown Device Type

Detecting Port 0 ...Warning - Time Out [FAILED]

!ERROR: PD Not Ready or Unknown Device Type

Detecting Port 7 [FAILED]

!ERROR: PD Not Ready or Unknown Device Type

 

... and then it gives up, posting the following message at the bottom in red text:

 

Warning - Something wrong with adapter, Press any key to escape bios!

 

 

 

Could my SATA adapter just up and die after a couple months' use?  Can anyone think of any other possible causes before I start foregoing food and other necessities to save up and buy a new one to see if that's the problem?

 

Reasonably system-savvy, but a complete Linux neophyte... Any help you guys can provide would be GREATLY appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance!

what you've got there doesn't look like an UnRaid/Linux error, that looks like the Card itself is having issues.

 

The ""Marvell 88SE63xx/64xx Adapter - BIOS Version 3.1.0.21" screen" is the card starting itself and detecting what drives are on it, the same as a motherboard does when it posts, this happens no matter what OS is running.

 

This can either be the card or the HDDs connected to it.

 

Try to see if those HDDs detect on another controller (i notice you have 2?) or the mainboard sata ports. That will help determine if its the card or the HDDs.

Also try to change the SAS-SATA cable.

 

You can also try reseating the card (taking it out of the PCIe slot and putting it back in) and the same with the cables.

OK, I've unplugged and replugged everything, and I'm getting the same errors - if I swap the positions of my two controller cards, but keep the SAS-SATA cables in the same positions relative to the PCIe slots, will that affect my array at all? 

 

I unplugged the controller card that was lit while the timeout messages appeared, and the Marvell detection screen read the other card like normal... once I saw two drives detect OK, I powered off to avoid booting into unraid without a chunk of drives (which I don't believe broke the cardinal rule, if this controller-screen is pre-unraid mounting, right?  I'd already pretty much given up my data for dead, so I'm not sweating it either way, but I'm still kind of feeling around on the "do's" and "don't"s...)

If UnRaid loads and HDDs are not in the same positions then the array wont start and you'll need to assign the correct HDDs to the correct disk number.

 

if you don't boot into unraid then you can do it without affecting anything

Definitely a bad cable.  Thanks, pantner!

no prob. glad it wasn't something bad like a HDD or controller! 

Absolutely - still a little concerned, since Monoprice seems to run out of these things periodically... I'm going to order a few extras just to be safe if the cables can really just "die" out of the blue like that!