April 10, 20251 yr This is a first and I'm totally stumped. Had an Exos 20TB drive fail. Replaced the drive and attempted to do a preclear. Now I'm just getting endless errors no matter which bay I put the drive into Diagnostics are attached. Any help would be greatly appreciated tower-diagnostics-20250410-1752.zip
April 10, 20251 yr Author 3 minutes ago, trurl said: Looks like bad connection Where would you begin troubleshooting? Sata cables? Somewhere else?
April 10, 20251 yr Community Expert 11 minutes ago, newoski said: no matter which bay I put the drive into Do you have a backplane?
April 10, 20251 yr Author 5 minutes ago, trurl said: Do you have a backplane? I'm not sure. I have a 20 drive NAS, built by Greenleaf Technology. 4 Drive Cages. SuiperMicro mobo. Tons of SATA cables to MOBO. Dual PCI Sata expansion cards. NAS has been running without issue for years. I've tried moving the drive to each of the 4 cages, and same problem. Edited April 10, 20251 yr by newoski
April 10, 20251 yr Community Expert So when you say 19 minutes ago, newoski said: which bay I put the drive into Does that actually require you to touch the SATA cables?
April 10, 20251 yr Author No, I just open the vertical bay door on the front, pull out the tray, screw in the drive and slide it back in This isn't my exact server, but it's nearly identical and functionally the same
April 10, 20251 yr Community Expert OK, the drive cages have backplanes. Do you have another drive you can try? Maybe just for testing, not necessarily for using.
April 10, 20251 yr Community Expert In fact, you could just plug a test drive in and see if we can get a SMART report. That other drive isn't giving us one.
April 10, 20251 yr Author 1 minute ago, trurl said: In fact, you could just plug a test drive in and see if we can get a SMART report. That other drive isn't giving us one. Just tried a different drive. Same results, including SMART not working
April 10, 20251 yr Author 47 minutes ago, trurl said: OK, the drive cages have backplanes. Do you have another drive you can try? Maybe just for testing, not necessarily for using. UPDATE: So I have (2) 20TB Exos that I received as RMA from ServerPartDeals. Both of them have had the same behavior. That said, I just threw an old Seagate 8TB Archive drive into the same slots and it's Preclearing now without issue. I can also run SMART tests on it. Not sure what to make of that at all /: Edited April 10, 20251 yr by newoski
April 12, 20251 yr Author On 4/10/2025 at 7:01 PM, trurl said: In fact, you could just plug a test drive in and see if we can get a SMART report. That other drive isn't giving us one. After speaking with the vendor where I got the drives, they believe they had a bad batch of drives and are sending me a new one. That said, I'm now a bit paranoid about all my empty drive bays. To test my bays, cables, and ports, could I just throw in a bunch of old 8TB Seagate Archive drives that are dying and run SMART and PreClear? Assuming the SMART reports are able to be run and the preclear are able to be run for hours and hours, can I assume connections are all good? Mark as Solution
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