Had a new thing happen to me yesterday; I bought 2x20TB Seagate Exos drives on cyber monday and swapped them in for my 14TB parity drives (2 years old). Here's the order I did everything:

 

Stopped server

added new drives into vacant slots in my DAS

Removed parity drive 1, added first 20TB

Started server, rebuilt parity

Repeated process for parity 2

Removed a 4TB drive, added 14TB, did data rebuild

 

All of the above went off without a hitch, zero errors (note that I did not do a preclear on the new drives as I figured they would get the same workout from the rebuilds). Everything was working fine, so I swapped in the final drive. Rebuild ran fine for 90%, then it and the second parity drive started throwing errors. Like 500+. The rebuild was frozen and, assuming it was the old parity/replacement drive (14TB) that was rebuilding that failed, I tried to replace the old data drive and rebuild the errored 20TB parity drive, but it wasn't showing up in the interface at all, as an option for the parity slot or in unassigned devices

 

I stopped the server, physically pulled the parity drive and put it back in and it showed up again. I am currently almost finished with rebuilding the 14TB data drive again (with single parity this time) and am using the preclear plugin to thoroughly test the 20TB. I also tried to find any errors with smart tests and smrtctl and neither produced any logged errors on either drive. It is entirely possible this was a mechanical fault on the DAS side, since just removing the sled and replacing it got the system to identify it and, aside from the drives themselves (at this point), my entire server is built from second hand and used parts.

 

So my question is this: if it preclears without a problem (and the data drive throws zero errors during the rebuild), should I try adding it back in as second parity or should I bite the bullet and just return it? I've never used preclear before so I don't know how reliable it is, but it seems like both drives are otherwise fine based on every test and piece of info I can find...

 

 

Edited December 10, 20232 yr by greyday
Removed old diag files

Looks more like a power/connection issue.

On 12/7/2023 at 1:28 AM, JorgeB said:

Looks more like a power/connection issue.

I'm marking that as "solution" since the drive passed preclear without a hitch. I'll update the original post if it fails when being entered back into parity but I think it was probably just a glitch...