sata controllers and hot swap problems.

[Mobius71]

I'm currently having an issue with hot swapping my hard drives and wanted to get some advice. My mobo is an asrock z97 extreme9. The case I'm using is a rosewill  rsv-l4412 that has 12 hot swap bays. I should be able to put my drives in any bay and be able to see them, but when testing this, after changing bays, some would report the disk missing. I tested the hot swap modules 4 at a time with 4 good cables connected to the Intel sata controller and had no problems. The hot swap bays are not faulty. I tested the same way only using the asmedia sata controller and had no apparent problems. The only thing I can think of is that using both controllers at the same time is causing problems with the drives mounting. Since unraid boots from the usb, I assumed that I could connect the sata ports in any order. I tried to research the problem to see if anyone was running into the same thing but have come up empty. Can anyone give me an idea of what's going on?

[Frank1940]

Have you verified that unRAID supports hot swapping of drives?  In the back of my mind, I recall that it does not!  I suspect that you will have to reboot the server at the very least.

[Mobius71]

I was thinking I read that it did for some reason somewhere in the documentation. At any rate, hot swap does work with the array stopped on some bays, buy I'm running into problems with 10 ports connected between 2 different controllers. One of which is an asmedia 1061 apparently which there seems to have been some problems with pcie sat cards with this controller from what I gather. Trying to see if this is related to my problem.

 

[itimpi]

Have you verified that unRAID supports hot swapping of drives?  In the back of my mind, I recall that it does not!  I suspect that you will have to reboot the server at the very least.

I have had no trouble hot-swapping drives if the array is stopped, or if the drives being swapped are not part of the array.    What you cannot do as far as I know is hot-swap a drive that is part of a started array.  There is the obvious caveat that the disk controller in use must support hot-swapping (not sure if this is purely an OS issue or whether the hardware can limit it as well).

 

Having said that I have seen guidance that recommends against hot-swapping at all, but I suspect that part of this might be to eliminate the chance of user-error in accidentally trying to hot-swap a drive that is part of the started array and thus likely causing the drive to be 'red-balled' by unRAID leading to a lengthy rebuild to get the array back to a protected state.

[Mobius71]

What you're saying about hot swapping when the array is stopped or swapping drives that aren't part of the array is exactly what I'm speaking of. I wouldn't try to hot swap anything when the array is started. That being said, I should be able to take parity or disk 1 and take it from bay 3 and put it in bay 6 and it still register as being present instead of missing. Naturally I'm not going to be mixing up the order of my drives like that, but I should still be able to have the functionality to do so. I guess I'm more concerned with having to put a new drive in, in the future and it not showing up so I can add it to the array if I already have all bays filled but one or if I'm trying to rebuild a drive from parity and the new drive doesn't register.  So if it's a mobo problem I can use a different mobo but if it's just a thing with unraid I'll  deal with it.

[itimpi]

What you're saying about hot swapping when the array is stopped or swapping drives that aren't part of the array is exactly what I'm speaking of. I wouldn't try to hot swap anything when the array is started. That being said, I should be able to take parity or disk 1 and take it from bay 3 and put it in bay 6 and it still register as being present instead of missing. Naturally I'm not going to be mixing up the order of my drives like that, but I should still be able to have the functionality to do so. I guess I'm more concerned with having to put a new drive in, in the future and it not showing up so I can add it to the array if I already have all bays filled but one or if I'm trying to rebuild a drive from parity and the new drive doesn't register.  So if it's a mobo problem I can use a different mobo but if it's just a thing with unraid I'll  deal with it.

My experience is that as long as the array is stopped, you can pull out drives and plug them in elsewhere and unRAID will be quite happy when you start up the array again.

 

I also regularly hot-swap drives that are not part of the array with the array started.  A typical reason for doing so might be that I want to do some preclears on drives and as I have unused SATA slots see no reason to take the system down while doing so.  Another reason could be that I want to copy files to/from a drive that is also used on another system (typically in NTFS format for use with a Windows system). 

[Mobius71]

That type of usage is what I was going for. I think I need some more testing to determine if it could possibly be bad sata cables or ports. Is there anything you would suggest I try to test the board ports or recommend a particular order of connecting the hot swap bays to the on board Sata ports besides what I've already tried?

[methanoid]

Mobius, are you running your unRAID using drives on your Asmedia ports? I am trying to troubleshoot my inability to create parity and it seems to be my Asmedia ports causing lockups (I think)

[Mobius71]

Mobius, are you running your unRAID using drives on your Asmedia ports? I am trying to troubleshoot my inability to create parity and it seems to be my Asmedia ports causing lockups (I think)

The only thing using the asmedia ports is my cache drive I believe. So it's not really affected by parity. It's an ssd that is really mostly used for running my docker apps and downloading. No problems with it in that capacity.