It seems that after adding my 11th drive.. that after a cold bootup unraid doesnt detect two of my drives.  However if I click the reboot button, all are detected OK the next time around.  I'm guessing this is a PSU issue, however all the disks are detected by the BIOS OK.

 

Is there anyway I can force a reboot if when unraid comes up some drives are missing?  (only 1 reboot, not continually reboot if there is an issue).  At least until i can figure out if i need a bigger psu.

There is no feature like you are describing.

 

Does the problem only happen on a cold boot?

 

Can you give some details on your rig. What PSU (# rails, watts), what version of unRaid, and types of drives (5400 vs 7200 rpm). 

 

If the problem really is an underpowered PSU, I'd recommend either leaving the rig up all the time (and manually spinning up the drives a few at a time) or shutting it down until you replace the PSU. Running the PSU to failure over and over again is not a good idea.

Is it always the same drives that don't show up?

 

What controllers are your drives on... particularly the ones that don't show up?

 

This is probably due to the drives taking too long to spin up, and the BIOS not seeing them.  If the drives are on a controller where the BIOS can be disabled on that controller, try that. 

 

Also, if your BIOS has an option for a full POST, enable it rather than the fast POST.... the extra time will give the drives more time to spin up before being probed by the BIOS.

All good suggestions.

I would surmise, there is either a power spike that the power supply cannot handle, a timing issue with drive initialization or a problem with a cable. Yes, it could be that simple.. I've seen it happen in my own system.

 

In any case you could possibly "try" setting some drives to power up in standby mode.

This would lighten the spike of powering up all drives at exactly the same time.

I have scripts and examples on the forum, do a search.

 

Just try setting a few of the more recent drives to use power up in standby and see if this helps.

 

It's sort of like a staggered spin. The bios may or may not detect all of the drives properties, but the kernel will initiate a spin request and wait for the drive to come up.

 

Please post a syslog of when you find drives have NOT been detected and one when all of the drives have been detected.

Just remember that power up in standby is not supported on all systems... on a system that doesn't support it, the drive would not be seen by the BIOS, and would not be available under unRAID.... hence the need to disable the controller BIOS.

Hi all, i'll try to answer all the questions:

 

Power supply is 550w xclio.  Reading the manual it seems to have 3 +12v rails.  The drives are a mix of sata/pata and are all 7200rpm.

 

Just to confirm.. the drives DO show in the BIOS post screen.  Strangely it is always the same drives which fail to show, yes.

 

The mobo is pretty old now, I dont think it supports power on standby and even if it did, probably only 1 or 2 of my drives are new enough to have that feature.

 

added syslog

The mobo is pretty old now, I dont think it supports power on standby and even if it did, probably only 1 or 2 of my drives are new enough to have that feature.

it's not so much the motherboard as it is more the drives, then again, some drives may be set to power up in standy and are causing this.

The more recentl drives will support this feature more so then the older ones.

Some WD drives have jumpers for it.

 

Strangely it is always the same drives which fail to show, yes.

 

This could be the drives or the controller where they are initialized.

 

Is it the Hitachi drives that are having issues?

if so I'm not suire Power up in standby would help here.

 

Oct  8 17:52:23 Tower emhttp: pci-0000:00:1f.1-scsi-0:0:0:0 (sdi) ata-Hitachi_HDT725032VLAT80_VF1200R202D1UA

Oct  8 17:52:23 Tower emhttp: pci-0000:00:1f.1-scsi-0:0:1:0 (sdj) ata-Hitachi_HDS721616PLAT80_PV6974ZH0SGWLN

Oct  8 17:52:23 Tower emhttp: pci-0000:00:1f.1-scsi-1:0:0:0 (sdk) ata-WDC_WD5000AAKB-00YSA0_WD-WCAS87014936

Oct  8 17:52:23 Tower emhttp: pci-0000:00:1f.1-scsi-1:0:1:0 (sdl) ata-Hitachi_HDT725032VLAT80_VF2200R21SN0VC

 

Oct  8 17:52:23 Tower emhttp: restart_md_driver: stat pci-0000:00:1f.1-ide-0:0: No such file or directory

Oct  8 17:52:23 Tower emhttp: restart_md_driver: stat pci-0000:00:1f.1-ide-1:0: No such file or directory

Oct  8 17:52:23 Tower emhttp: restart_md_driver: stat pci-0000:00:1f.1-ide-1:1: No such file or directory

 

Reading the manual it seems to have 3 +12v rails.

 

What matters is how many AMPS are on each 12V Rail.

 

 

Power supply is 550w xclio.  Reading the manual it seems to have 3 +12v rails.  The drives are a mix of sata/pata and are all 7200rpm.

 

Power supplies that have separate "rails" split the power amoung the various rails.  So 550/3 = 183 watts per rail.

 

Normally all of the 12v peripheral plugs are on ONE rail.  The other rails are to supply power hungry graphics cards with power.

 

If you decide to upgrade your PSU, look for a single rail design.  That will allow all of the available power to be used for your hard disks.

 

Good luck!

It's a little confusing.  You mentioned the trouble started after adding the 11th drive, and that 2 were missing.  The syslog shows it found and set up 13 drives, and that 3 more IDE drives are missing, although they may be mis-identified instead.  The array had 12 drives, with currently 3 missing - Disk 7, Disk 9, and Disk 10.  The 13 drives found have been set up with SCSI device ID's (sda - sdz), which in this case are usually SATA drives.  You have 4 drives that are especially confusing, the 4 displayed by WeeboTech above.  None of them are a part of your current array, so it is conceivable that 3 of these 4 have been mis-identified, and correspond to the 3 missing IDE drives, except that 3 of these 4 drives are SATA drives (the Hitachi's), but connected as PATA and are using the ata_piix driver, normally used by an onboard Intel ICH controller in IDE emulation situations.  The fourth drive of this strange set of 4 is a WDC WD5000AAKB, which is an IDE drive (!!!), connected with the 3 SATA drives!  Perhaps you are using an IDE-to-SATA adapter.

 

Whether you have 13 or 16 drives, it does look like you may have hit your power limits at startup.  I looked up your PSU, didn't recognize it, but found good reviews, and it does have very good specs.  The 3 rails have 18 Amp, 18Amp, and 16Amp, so it's possible there are too many drives on one rail, and you could test that by juggling the power connectors around to balance the drive power needs.  Your best choice of course is a bigger power supply with one rail, next best is staggering the startup per WeeboTech's advice, but for now you could just unhook power to any of the drive(s) that you aren't using in the array.  You could also just press Ctl-Alt-Del when the unRAID menu first comes up on the console, if you aren't running headless.

According to a search on the model numbers the Hitachi's are PATA, At least from what my search revealed.

 

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/T7k500/T7k500.htm

http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/7k160/7k160.htm

 

 

The 3 rails have 18 Amp, 18Amp, and 16Amp, so it's possible there are too many drives on one rail, and you could test that by juggling the power connectors around to balance the drive power needs.  Your best choice of course is a bigger power supply with one rail,

 

I'm going to also go with this too. From the few power supply calculators I've seen, you're on the edge.

If you check via the corsair site, they will recommend one within your average size, but they also have logic to share power amoung the rails for a peak.

 

Other then that choose a single rail power supply.

 

You might get away with the power up in standby for a short time. But this also may subject you to random lockups or kenel oops.

FWIW, I've run 8 drives on a 300 watt power supply before.

4 10,000 rpm and 4 5400 IDE. The SCSI drives were in staggered spin up so it did work for me.. (for years in fact).

 

According to a search on the model numbers the Hitachi's are PATA, At least from what my search revealed.

 

You're right!  I Google'd only 'Hitachi HDT725032' and 'Hitachi HDS721616', and the first choices that came up were all SATA.  That single T near the end (HDT725032VLAT80 and HDS721616PLAT80) made all the difference.  I'll have to be more careful.

 

And 4 PATA drives there make (a little) more sense.  But why aren't they hda through hdd?

Why aren't they hda through hdd?

 

Good question. They might be in some emulation mode through a bios setting.

Thanks for all the replies everyone 

 

Firstly the PSU:

 

+12v1: 18a

+12v2: 18a

+12v3: 16a

 

I've uploaded a screenshot showing the ones that are missing after each cold boot.  Yes its always 3 that are missing, typo on my original post - sorry!

 

I'll try switching around the plugs that the drives are on, to see if that helps..  does anyone know how to identify which connectors correspond to the 3 rails?  Or is it the case that 2 of the rails are the red ones (i.e for graphics) and the other rail is for all the drives?  If thats the case, that may be the issue.