Hi all, 

 

my parity drive has just dropped off. I've tried reconnecting sata and power as i've seen that cause dramas in the past, but there are no SMART errors reported, I have zero idea why the drive isn't reporting. It's only  a handful of months old, I feel it's unlikely it just died out of the blue. 

 

Any troubleshooting advice is super welcome. 

 

Diags attached. 

vision-diagnostics-20241218-1807.zip

The drive has been disabled (marked with a red 'x') because a write to it has failed.   More often than not the drive itself is fine and this is caused by an external factor such as the SATA or power cabling to the drive so these need to be carefully checked especially as there appear to have been quite a few CRC errors which are communication errors between the host and the drive.

 

The SMART information otherwise looks fine so if you wan to continue using this drive for parity then to clear the disabled state the parity will need to be rebuilt which you can do by:

• Stop array
• Start array to 'forget' current parity drive assignment
• Stop array
• Reassign parity drive
• Start array to start rebuild of parity.

Thanks for that. I've tried reseating cables to no effect, and tried the same cables (both power and sata) with drives that are working. When swapping the drives which get the cables from the non-functioning parity drive work fine, while the parity drive remains disabled. I don't believe this is a connection issue based on that testing. 

 

Is there anything else that this could be? 

 

I have a replacement drive ready to go so I can send this one back as broken, i just don't think it is. 

Once a disk is disabled, swapping cables won't re-enable it, you need to rebuild, or in this case resync parity, try again with new cables, and if it happens again, replace the disk.

Roger, thank you. 

29 minutes ago, Bakes32 said:

Roger, thank you. 

It is worth pointing out that if you use power splitters to get the required number of power connections to drives that these can sometimes cause intermittent problems if you try and split a SATA one more than 2 way.

28 minutes ago, itimpi said:

It is worth pointing out that if you use power splitters to get the required number of power connections to drives that these can sometimes cause intermittent problems if you try and split a SATA one more than 2 way.

Thank you, that's super helpful. I am using multiple sata power connectors from molex. Perhaps it's time to get a more appropriate psu. 

 

I really appreciate the follow up. That actually makes a bit of sense for what i've been noticing. 

51 minutes ago, Bakes32 said:

I am using multiple sata power connectors from molex.

Molex->Sata can normally be split about 4 way without issues.   SATA->SATA should be limited to about 2 way to avoid issues.