February 5, 20251 yr This is sort of a continuation of this post: TL;DR - two hard drives dropped online, replaced them, same errors occurred on the new drive, rechecked connections and discovered what appeared to be a loose Molex connection. Thought the errors were now gone and jinxed myself, because now I'm posting again... Unfortunately since that post, the I/O errors came back. To eliminate more variables, I next replaced the LSI RAID card with a AS1064 4-port SATA card, and got brand new SATA cables to rule out any cabling problems. I replaced the card and SATA cables today and booted up the server and decided to run preclears on the new drives before doing anything with the array. I watched as both of the drives failed the pre-read cycle of the preclear minutes after starting the operation. Now I'm completely lost as to what to do. The only hardware that I haven't swapped out yet is the PSU and the backplane itself built into the NAS chassis. But I don't think it's the backplane because I've tried swapping around the drives and the problems follow, and if the backplane was faulty I think whatever drive was connected to that "faulty" slot would cause issues. For the PSU it's a Lian Li SFX-sized SP750 unit. It's been running fine since June 2022, and according to PSU calculators is completely overkill for this build since the recommended wattage is only at like 380W. I was wondering if anyone encountered anything like this where the software I/O errors persist despite nearly replacing all the components of the NAS. Diagnostics attached. dipper-diagnostics-20250205-0214.zip
February 5, 20251 yr Community Expert Solution Still looks like a power/connection problem, how is the backplane powered up? Any power splitters? It would be good to retest with a different PSU, if you have one available.
March 4, 20251 yr Author Thank you @JorgeB! Your diagnosis was right. It turned out that one or both of the Molex plugs had developed an unreliable connection, possibly due to me going slightly above the cable rating when the drives all spun up at once. The server is now running along with all drives restored by temporarily running with the other connectors on the same Molex cable. If anyone is interested I wrote a blog post about it here: https://ericswpark.com/blog/2025/2025-03-04-i-nearly-lost-my-entire-server/ Sorry for the late reply; I just about got everything wrapped up this morning.
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