One (1) drive never appears in array, nor available, nor Unassigned Devices...

[ksw10292]

My Unassigned Devices have always work with any drive I've ever connected to my UnRaid server
over the past few years. A wide variety of various brands, models, sizes, speeds, age, etc.
Some are new, some 5-12 years old, some are SSDs, some are mechanical drives, SATA and SAS, 2.5" and 3.5".

Except this 1 drive. It's a Seagate 4TB SATA ST4000LM016 2.5".
(Commonly found 5 years ago)

I connect it to UnRaid... and it never appears in my Unassigned Devices list.
I've tried several different slots in my hot-swappable drive bays.

The green LED light is on. The drive is getting power.
Tried hitting the "refresh" button near Unassigned Device.

If I remove it from UnRaid, and connect the drive (via a USB enclosure) to
a Windows 10 computer... it works fine. I can DiskPart-Clean it, format it with Disk
Management, partition it, read/write data to it, anything.
But when I move it back to UnRaid, it never appears in Unassigned, nor even as "pick a
drive choice" when the array is stopped.

I tried connecting it to UnRaid while the drive was empty, or full, formatted or not,
FAT32 or NTFS, 1 partition or multiple, DiskPart-Cleaned (raw), etc.

Are there some brands/models of drives that just plain "never work with Unassigned Devices"?
(Thank God I only bought 1 of these drives, and not 10)

Does UnAssigned Devices do any kind of filtering, blocking drives based on brand, model, age, or
prior formatting, etc?

Edited September 14 by ksw10292

[SimonF]

33 minutes ago, ksw10292 said:

My Unassigned Devices have always work with any drive I've ever connected to my UnRaid server
over the past few years. A wide variety of various brands, models, sizes, speeds, age, etc.
Some are new, some 5-12 years old, some are SSDs, some are mechanical drives, SATA and SAS, 2.5" and 3.5".

Except this 1 drive. It's a Seagate 4TB SATA ST4000LM016 2.5".
(Commonly found 5 years ago)

I connect it to UnRaid... and it never appears in my Unassigned Devices list.
I've tried several different slots in my hot-swappable drive bays.

The green LED light is on. The drive is getting power.
Tried hitting the "refresh" button near Unassigned Device.

If I remove it from UnRaid, and connect the drive (via a USB enclosure) to
a Windows 10 computer... it works fine. I can DiskPart-Clean it, format it with Disk
Management, partition it, read/write data to it, anything.
But when I move it back to UnRaid, it never appears in Unassigned, nor even as "pick a
drive choice" when the array is stopped.

I tried connecting it to UnRaid while the drive was empty, or full, formatted or not,
FAT32 or NTFS, 1 partition or multiple, DiskPart-Cleaned (raw), etc.

Are there some brands/models of drives that just plain "never work with Unassigned Devices"?
(Thank God I only bought 1 of these drives, and not 10)

Does UnAssigned Devices do any kind of filtering, blocking drives based on brand, model, age, or
prior formatting, etc?

Anything in logs? post diagnostics also check port not shared with nvme slot etc

[whipdancer]

1 hour ago, ksw10292 said:

I've tried several different slots in my hot-swappable drive bays.

Does UnAssigned Devices do any kind of filtering, blocking drives based on brand, model, age, or
prior formatting, etc?

I assume the different bays worked as expected with a different drive - correct?

I'm not aware of UAD doing anything like that (my oldest drive is from 2009 and is used in UAD as temp storage).

Like @SimonF said - post diagnostics.

[ksw10292]

Would it be possible to upload just 1-2 of the diagnostic files? (The 1 that pertains to 'recognizing newly installed drives')

The whole set is huge and contains WAY too much info for me to be posting it publicly.

Even when "anonymize" I see it contains full VM machine names (our user's first and last names), etc.

And info that has nothing to do with "unassigned drives" or "newly added drives".

 

[ksw10292]

1 hour ago, SimonF said:

> ... also check port not shared with nvme slot etc

I tried several different of the hot-swappable bays. So I know that not all of them could be doing the "share with nvme slot" thing. Other drives work, but never the Seagate ST4000LM016. It also rules out "cable problems" because I know so many bays can't all be having "bad cable" problems.... but only with this 1 magical drive.

 

Could it just be "a bad drive"? But I can't explain why it works 100% under Windows 10 and a USB external case.

 

[Wody]

How are your bays powered? If it is with a SATA connector, see if you can power it with a Molex connector instead, or use a Molex-to-SATA adapter. You say the drive powers up, but it may be the 3.3v pin issue that is causing the drive to shut down.

[ksw10292]

14 hours ago, whipdancer said:

I assume the different bays worked as expected with a different drive - correct?

I'm not aware of UAD doing anything like that (my oldest drive is from 2009 and is used in UAD as temp storage).

Like @SimonF said - post diagnostics.

A wide variety of drives always work in any bay I put them in. This 1 Seagate drive doesn't work in ANY of the bays I've tried so far.

 

Could the drive be formatted/partitioned/initialized in a strange way that Unraid/UnassignedDevices can never see? Or should that not matter? Does Unraid just see "any drive, from any prior use case" as immediately available as "a drive for reuse in Unraid"?

[ksw10292]

10 hours ago, Wody said:

How are your bays powered? If it is with a SATA connector, see if you can power it with a Molex connector instead, or use a Molex-to-SATA adapter. You say the drive powers up, but it may be the 3.3v pin issue that is causing the drive to shut down.

How do you "power with a SATA connector"? All the drives slide right into the backplane that supplies all power and all SATA connections. I never touch cables. Other than this 1 drive, all the cables properly power any drive and all data flows without any problems.

 

Do certain "odd" drives need 3.3v pins... but none of my other assorted drive do?

 

[ksw10292]

I tried 4 more things. The drive still never appears in UnRaid. (Still works fine in Windows 10, though)

 

1. Covered pin #3 with tape.

2. Covered pins 1,2,3 with tape.

3. Removed all tape and physically ripped out pin #3 at the back of the drive.

4. Physically removed pin 3, and covered pins 1-2 with tape.

 

Someone really changed the standard and said "gee, let's use pin #3 for some different purpose and cause all drives that use it, to never spin up again"?

Wouldn't that cause millions of drives to have problems? (And their existing data)

 

 

 

Edited September 15 by ksw10292

[whipdancer]

On 9/15/2024 at 8:40 AM, ksw10292 said:

Could the drive be formatted/partitioned/initialized in a strange way that Unraid/UnassignedDevices can never see? Or should that not matter? Does Unraid just see "any drive, from any prior use case" as immediately available as "a drive for reuse in Unraid"?

I've never heard of that happening. I've added drives formatted in NTFS, Fat, ExFat (or whatever that is), whatever format an older Mac would have used, as well as a few different formats from *nix systems - the only time they didn't show up was the 3.3v issue or the drive was bad.

[whipdancer]

18 hours ago, ksw10292 said:

I tried 4 more things. The drive still never appears in UnRaid. (Still works fine in Windows 10, though)

 

1. Covered pin #3 with tape.

2. Covered pins 1,2,3 with tape.

3. Removed all tape and physically ripped out pin #3 at the back of the drive.

4. Physically removed pin 3, and covered pins 1-2 with tape.

 

Someone really changed the standard and said "gee, let's use pin #3 for some different purpose and cause all drives that use it, to never spin up again"?

Wouldn't that cause millions of drives to have problems? (And their existing data)

 

 

 

No, the standard was always there, but not all drives supported it (it previously only found on enterprise class drives). For some reason, that feature seems to be making its way down to retail class drives, but not consistently across brands/models (anecdotally speaking). I ran into it because I started buy enterprise class drives.

Just an FYI if you run into the 3.3v problem:
My solution was to modify my power cables. My sata power cables were not flat, wide, stranded cables, but were 5 separate wires (like this one), I clipped the 5th wire (the side that corresponds to pin 3) and that cleared up the issue for me. I used the wiring diagrams for sata power to understand what wires were doing what and it seemed like it should work. It has and no issues in the last 5-ish years with my solution.

Edited September 16 by whipdancer
3.3v

[SimonF]

18 hours ago, ksw10292 said:

I tried 4 more things. The drive still never appears in UnRaid. (Still works fine in Windows 10, though)

 

1. Covered pin #3 with tape.

2. Covered pins 1,2,3 with tape.

3. Removed all tape and physically ripped out pin #3 at the back of the drive.

4. Physically removed pin 3, and covered pins 1-2 with tape.

 

Someone really changed the standard and said "gee, let's use pin #3 for some different purpose and cause all drives that use it, to never spin up again"?

Wouldn't that cause millions of drives to have problems? (And their existing data)

 

 

 

Post diagnostics if block size is not 512 unraid will not see