Drives throwing random errors then passing preclear?

[FlyingTexan]

As a recap: The other day I swapped out drive planes so I could drop down from using two HBA card to running my drive cages off one. Not too long after I had a failure of a drive, or so I thought, without much else to go on I swapped drives. The same drive kept failing. Then it turned into two drives at one point. I'd dropped one of the drive cages about 6 inches onto tile which was a pretty solid thud so originally chalked it up to my mistake.

 

The drives would then work again but later fall offline with no reasoning as to why. The drive caddy for each of the drives is flashing a "do not eject" symbol. I took the drives and moved them to different locations wondering if it was the backplane. It doesn't appear that it was. The drives still failed eventually. So I purchased two 10TB drives off amazon, purchased a two bay external dock, attached the dock with the drives to the server and ran a preclear on both drives. After I think about two days each drive passed 100%.

Today I swapped the drives out with the two that were thought to be faulty. I placed the new drives in the server and, just to be sure, took the old drives and put them in the external dock. The two new 10TB drives are still flashing the same error as before on the drive caddy.

So far the two old drives have passed their smart data and are in the pre-clear process without issue. That doesn't mean they're out of the woods yet, I'm going to let the preclear do it's full workup. Again the two new replacement drives are flashing the same issue on the drive caddy however they are currently operating fine. Video above.

My drive cages are HP DL380s. I don't know anything about them except they fit the bill for what I was trying to do. What roll do the caddy's play for this disk shelf? The drives plug directly into the backplane so is the blinking just coincidental? The two 10TB drives appear to be functioning correctly and currently the two older drives are still going through preclear and looking ok so far. Why wouldn't the caddy's clear their light?

 

If the two drives I pulled end up passing their preclear I may just try and put them back in. But I'm worried they'd fall offline again and cause tons of hiccups.

 

EDIT*** Just had one parity drive show errors

today diagnostics.zip

[JorgeB]

The errors with disk21 are logged as a disk problem, but there's no SMART report for that disk, parity error is very odd since there aren't the usually controller errors before, see if disabling spin down helps.

[FlyingTexan]

8 hours ago, JorgeB said:

The errors with disk21 are logged as a disk problem, but there's no SMART report for that disk, parity error is very odd since there aren't the usually controller errors before, see if disabling spin down helps.

See but it doesn't happen when spinning down it happens when longer term usage. Do you think it could be bad cables? I've just ordered four new ones but don't get them till monday. Right now I'm just limping things along. I did a new config, removed the parity drive, started array with "Parity is correct" or whatever just so I don't know have to sit through 36hrs of it running again.   Disk 21 and 22 were both new drives that passed preclear in an external enclosure that I then put into the system.   The two drives that failed before I pulled from the system and they passed preclear also after the fact. 

 

I'm unsure if it's a cable though because it's not consistent on where the errors happen. Could a backplane be going bad and cause this?

 

After a couple reboots it now sees the 1st parity drive again. I'm not sure I want to add it not knowing what the issue is if it's power supply, cables, or what.

Edited November 10, 2023 by FlyingTexan

[JorgeB]

11 hours ago, FlyingTexan said:

See but it doesn't happen when spinning down

If that's the problem it would be on spin up, not spin down.

 

Unlikely the parity errors were cable related since there aren't any controller errors.