Bought a new hard drive and have to rebuild parity (12 drives in my server), and I've noticed every few minutes or so the whole process comes to a halt, then after a few seconds starts up again. Now that I'm looking, this seems to be happening during other intensive hard drive operations, not just rebuilding parity (or with the new drive).

Checking my syslog, I see a couple of my drives consistently sending me these kind of messages. Not every second or even every minute:

Oct 5 11:50:07 VERREYNAS kernel: ata6: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Oct 5 11:50:07 VERREYNAS kernel: ata6: hard resetting link

Oct 5 11:50:13 VERREYNAS kernel: ata6: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)

Oct 5 11:50:16 VERREYNAS kernel: ata6: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)

Oct 5 11:50:16 VERREYNAS kernel: ata6.00: configured for UDMA/133

Oct 5 11:50:16 VERREYNAS kernel: ata6: EH complete

Oct 5 11:50:27 VERREYNAS kernel: ata3: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)

Oct 5 11:50:31 VERREYNAS kernel: ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Oct 5 11:50:36 VERREYNAS kernel: ata3: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)

Oct 5 11:50:41 VERREYNAS kernel: ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)

Oct 5 11:50:42 VERREYNAS kernel: ata3: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 310)

Oct 5 11:50:42 VERREYNAS kernel: ata3.00: configured for UDMA/33

Not sure what steps to take next. The unraid seems to be happy otherwise, but it seems like there is an underlying problem. With one of my hard drives? My controller? (LSI 2308 / SuperMicro X10SL7-F). Bad cables, expecting too much out of this somewhat old controller?

Edited October 5, 2025Oct 5 by MoreDinosaurs

Please post the diagnostics.

I did a little more debugging and began to suspect the builtin controller on my motherboard. I swapped around sata cables and moved things off of the 2308 and onto the builtin sata ports, and errors seemed to follow the builtin ports, though only after I started rebuilding parity for about half-an-hour.

I bought a 9207-8i, and plugged that into my remaining PCIE 2.0 x4 port on the board, and moved 8 of my 12 drives onto that, leaving 4 on the 2308. Everything showed up, and I'm currently rebuilding parity. A couple hours into it, and no failures, so I'm optimistic that was the issue (a relief since it means I haven't lost data). Sounds like it's time to upgrade my motherboard...