November 30, 20169 yr Hi Folks, This is not a support problem, but more of a "if it's happening to you, it might be this" post For several years, I have been running 2 M1015 SAS cards, and have always had slow boot-ups (Usually taking almost 10 minutes to get to login prompt) and painful shutdowns (If I didn't shut everything down - plugins, dockers, vms, close all connections to server, run 'Kill Open Files') before stopping the array, it would often just loop in the unmount step. I'd eventually have to manually unmount and shutdown (which usually worked ok, but sometimes led to an unclean shutdown and a lengthy parity check). I just assumed this was the way it was... For the record, I would get occasional messages in my log about unresponsive drives or drive errors, but unRaid always managed to recover and I just wasn't overly concerned. Again, because I had them from almost the get-go, I assumed this was just the way it was. Next time I'll pay more attention to these errors! A few times, I even had drives spontaneously disconnect (usually only one or two) during intensive disk activity. This happened again a few weeks ago, but this time, it happened to 5 drives at once. Once I realized that all 5 drives were on the same controller, I pulled the controller and put my old AOC-SASLP-MV8 back in... What a difference! Suddenly, my time to the login prompt was down to a few minutes. Shutdowns have yet to get stuck on the unmounting step (Though I'm still shutting everything down first), and no drives have spontaneously disconnected (Though again, that only happened a few times over several years)... Parity checks have slowed down a bit (most likely due to the older 4x AOC-SASLP-MV8), but not a huge deal, and I haven't had time to scan my log for unresponsive drives (though I assume, if the controller was the issue, these should be gone). I've ordered 2 more reverse breakout cables, as I have 8 sata ports on my motherboard not being used, so once they arrive, I'll pull the old card out entirely. So, all that to say, though the card appeared to function fine 95% of the time, if you're having any of the symptoms I experienced above, perhaps you too have a flaky controller that usually works, but sometimes doesn't .
November 30, 20169 yr Flaky problems = painful experiences. Thanks for sharing. Perhaps we should have a board specifically for 'try this before tossing hardware'?!?
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.