December 18, 201213 yr Bad CRC errors are comunications errors between the disk controller and the disk, usually caused by noise pickup on the cables. This noise pickup occurs when the cables are either of poor quality, not shielded, or tie-wrapped into neat bundles allowing maximum noise coupling between them. It can also occur if the power supply is electrically noisy, or not sized for the load of hardware being powered. A third possibility is a motherboard (or disk controller) with poor noise immunity. Step 1. If the cables are neatly bundled, cut the tie-wraps and separate the cables so they are not all parallel and adjacent. Step 2. Consider better cables. (Higher quality, or shielded) Step 3. Evaluate how the disks are being powered. (Too many splitters, or a low capacity power supply rail can easily be the cause) Joe L.
December 20, 201213 yr Author Well it has been driving me crazy!!! It has been quite frustrating, shuffling disks, cables, drive bays etc... it was hard to see any logic and I'm still not sure I'm seeing it correctly. My main suspect now is the power connectors. It looks like the molex plugs of my Seasonic PSU might have quite big female opening, causing a bad connection with the Norco cages. Putting an extender cable in between seems to solve this. However the extender is probably too small gauge to provide clean power to support 5 disks in a cage, as with 5 disks I'm getting all sorts of errors and missing disks (due to COMRESET errors). The PSU itself is a Seasonic S12ii 520 Bronze, so should be sufficient for the 7 disks I have in my server in total.
January 5, 201313 yr Author Time for a little update... still no luck. I still have 'random' disks dropping out, apparently independent of the cage and port they're mounted in. I've changed all SATA cables but no luck. The two common hardware elements in all my swapping around are the PSU en the motherboard. The cache disk running on the PCIe SATA card appears to be stable, so power appears to be ok and my main suspect is the motherboard. I've returned this (it's still under warranty I believe) to my shop. They've have diagnosed it as faulty and returned it to Asus (I do have my doubts though whether they actually tested or just based it on my fault description). A replacement/repair should be returned soon. I hope this solves my problems! It cost me way too much time and frustration so far....
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