Hi Folks

Issue:

All 4 previously working HDDs on PCI SATA Adapter are no longer seen by Unraid.

Narrative:

I have a 5-drive + 2 parity array. I have been upsizing all drives over the past few months from the original random leftover drives when I built the system, to 5x8TB. Generally, there have been no issues swapping the previous 4 data and 2 parity drives to larger ones. Last night, I swapped the final 4TB to 8TB, and now that fun has started. Upon boot, all 4 drives connected via StarTech.com PEXSAT34RH 4 Port PCI Express SATA III 6Gbps RAID Controller Card PCIe SATA 3 Controller Adapter are no longer available.

Troubleshooting to date:

1. Disconnected "offending" drive and rebooted. No change.

2. Moved SATA Adapter to different PCI lane. No change.

3. Disconnected all HDDs from SATA Adapter. No change.

4. Verified controller is shown in Unraid-System Devices.

5. Added "pci=realloc=off" to Syslinux configuration - Unraid OS GUI Mode. No change.

I have another SATA Adapter on order, but I don't expect it's the issue. This was also the final drive I was swapping, and since I had previously had no issues, I was "bold" enough (read: stupid enough) to start wiping the 4TB HDD I was replacing; so now I have 4/5 data drives intact and the 2 parities; thus I will need to rebuild the data on the replacement disk.

Before I negatively affect the WAF (Wife Approval Factory) and steal her monitor for local troubleshooting, what are my next steps?

vesper-diagnostics-20250826-0804.zip vesper-syslog-20250826-1404.zip

Edited August 26, 2025Aug 26 by bjsmith911

It very well could be that sata card. Marvell and raid cards are not recommended due to huge amount of problems. Check out this post for recommended controllers.

25 minutes ago, Gragorg said:

It very well could be that sata card. Marvell and raid cards are not recommended due to huge amount of problems. Check out this post for recommended controllers.

Ok. I have a LSI SAS/SATA 9300 16I HBA card on order, with breakout cables.

in the meantime, I'm just screwed? This is pure chance that it's been running off this card for ~2 years and this reboot it decided it's done?

The controller is failing to initialize the disks:

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata14: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata12: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata10: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata8: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata13: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata9: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata11: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata7: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata14: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata10: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata12: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata8: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)

Aug 26 07:29:57 Vesper kernel: ata9: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)

Disabling vt-d can sometimes help with these Marvell controllers, but would still recommend replacing it with one of the recommended ones. Sometimes just a hardware or kernel change is enough to cause issues.

No real solution; replacement Adapter arrived (also Marvell); installed and all drives recognized. This can be closed, anyway.