Problems with controller card after new hardware install

[Cornbreadman]

I have been planning an upgrade to Unraid 6 for a few weeks now. First I wanted to upgrade the hardware on my 3-4 year old system as I want to run some application directly on the server now.

 

Anyway I started with changing out my old motherboard, processor and memory which were working just fine with my SD-SA2PEX-2IR Controller Card.

 

The new components are as follows.

 

Intel Core i7-4790 3.6GHz Quad-Core Processor

Gigabyte GA-H110M-A Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard

G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2133 Memory

 

When I booted up after installing everything I noticed 2 drives showing errors. One was showing as the wrong drive and one was showing as unformatted. After playing around trying to diagnose I found out these are the drive hooked up to the Controller Card. I had another card, thought maybe I damaged the first one during install, but same result on that one too.

 

My next thought is the card doesn't want to play nice with this motherboard which would really suck. But before making any rash decisions I figured I would seek out some help here. I can't really make heads or tails of syslogs to find out exactly what I causing the problems and then I read online about this HPA thing on Gigabyte motherboards. Read it was on older MB but still has me nervous and honestly don't know if its even the same type of issue or not.

 

Can anyone maybe shine some light on what the issue is and possibly what the fix is? New controller card, New motherboard? Or just something that needs to be changed in the BIOS maybe?

 

Thanks for any help in advance!

 

BTW I am running Unraid 5.0-rc15a

 

syslog.txt

[RobJ]

Some comments -

 

* You might have been better to upgrade first to v6, better hardware support, and no wrong format option.  That may still be a good plan.

 

* CPU is reported as:  Intel® Core i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz

 

* Your controller card is based on the Si3124 chipset.  While it's cheap and provides 4 SATA ports, it's 4 *slow* SATA ports, and it's on the PCI bus, which is going to hamstring any fast drives attached, like the WD Red drive on it now.  I strongly recommend replacing it with a PCIe card.  For example, the ASM1061 cards are cheap too, but very fast (only 2 ports though).  Here's one I purchased, currently only $9.45 with free shipping, but takes a couple of weeks to arrive.

 

* There's definitely a problem, either the controller card or Disk 2 (WD20EARS).  If the controller card is fine, then the drive is not.  It's reporting an IDNF error (ID Not Found) which is serious, part of the low level formatting, not something we can fix.  Drive should probably be analyzed by the WD drive tool, hopefully still under warranty.  We need to see the SMART report, and it would be good to run a SMART long test on it.

 

* Because of the serious errors on the drive, it failed mounting.  In the older versions (such as your v5), if a drive fails to mount for ANY reason, it will then indicate it needs to be formatted (wrongly!).  DO NOT FORMAT IT!  You are best right now unassigning it, purchasing a replacement, and rebuilding Disk 2 onto the replacement.

 

* Your comment about 2 drives showing problems was incorrect.  On first boot, the drives all came up correct, but then it couldn't mount Disk 2 (showed needing formatting), and you stopped the array.  You then unassigned Disk 1 and Disk 2, then reassigned them but swapped their assignments, so one was still bad (the original Disk 2), and the other was now marked as a wrong drive.  You then unmounted all but the Parity drive, and experimented with various mountings, then remounted them all correctly, and started the array.  At that point, you probably saw the same situation as after the first boot, with Disk 2 unmountable and asking to be formatted.

 

* There's no evidence of HPA's, at least one issue you don't have to worry about!

[Cornbreadman]

First off, thank you so much for taking some time to shed some light on the situation!

 

I found out after posting that I had someone connected to my plex server watching a show when I shut down the system. Don't know if this could have played a part in the hard drive becoming corrupted or whatever happened with it. After posting I also reinstalled all the old hardware and it told me that disk1 was invalid and needed to be rebuilt which I did today while sleeping. Everything seems to be fine now.

 

The processor I listed was incorrect. It is a Intel® Core i5-6500 CPU @ 3.20GHz. Dont know where I got the other from.

 

The old controller while slow, I have had since my first build on unraid and has always served me well so while slow, its all I have ever known so doesnt really affect me, but for the price you suggested on the other, I will be ordering those ones. Thank you!

 

The drive seems to be fine now. Don't know exactly what happened. I think because I am impatient and a daredevil lol, I am going to upgrade to v6 tonight, then swap the hardware again and see how it goes. If I run into anymore problems I will probably just wait till the new card comes in.

 

Disk 1 I got the red ball on, which was the one I had to rebuild today. Disk 2 was the one that showed as unformatted.

 

Anyway thanks for some insight like I said. Guess I will just start over and see how it goes.

 

Thank you!

[RobJ]

Thanks for the picture.  One of the problems with v4 and v5 is that red ball info was never logged, so I saw no evidence of any problems with Disk 1 in the syslog.  All of the problems involved Disk 2 (which I still think should be examined more closely, the SMART report).  v6 makes it easy to check it, and run a long SMART test.  v6 also provides much more complete diagnostics info, and I could have seen the red ball status.

 

I'll reiterate one point, either the controller is flaky or the drive is bad.  If you are sure the drive is good, then that controller can no longer be trusted, is responsible for the problems with both Disk 1 and Disk 2.  I'd be careful using it, keep a close eye on it and its drives.  I don't trust it.

 

Glad you're back up and running though.  I was afraid the situation was worse, would take longer to be back up.

[Cornbreadman]

Yep upgraded to v6 and everything went fine on the old hardware. When I put the new hardware in again, the same problem occurred. Back the old hardware now and rebuilding Disk1 yet again. Yippy. Guessing the problem is the controller card for some reason. Both drives show as fine in any smart reports I run, but I may miss something. The 3TB disk1 is still under warranty and the 2TB disk2 isn't but I have a couple extra backups in the house in case they are needed.

 

I am just going to order that controller card you suggested for now and leave it all on the old hardware till it comes in as everything seems stable that way.

 

Thanks again for the help!