After the Fix Common Problems plugin kept reminding me that I may have issues due to my Marvel controllers, it was recommended to me to swap them out for something like an LSI 9201, which I managed to attain for a good price.

I have been reluctant to do the swap bc I am unclear on what exactly that will entail in terms of potential changes to my BIOS settings or what have you...the LSI was recommended to me because "it works out of the box", but what does that actually mean? does that mean that I can swap it for the two 8 port controllers that I have in there now, hook up my 15 drives, boot up the server, and be done with it, or is it more complicated than that?

I would think that it isn't as simple as "just swapping it", but while yet another disk that threw errors is now rebuilding, I thought I'd turn to the community to ask if anyone knows what to expect and what to do during such a procedure.

Is it that simple, or how complicated is it? what do I need to be careful with?

22 minutes ago, tillkrueger said:

does that mean that I can swap it for the two 8 port controllers that I have in there now, hook up my 15 drives, boot up the server, and be done with it, or is it more complicated than that?

Usually that's it.

that would be nice...here's to hoping!

maybe I'll find the time to head over to where my server is tomorrow and give that a try...I'll be glad when that upgrade is done...maybe I'll finally have far less "failed" drives...I had been wondering why my WD Red drives have been failing at a rate of 1-2 per year...hope that was the reason.

well, I'd lie if I said that I wasn't surprised when the array came up just like it did before I swapped out the old SuperMicro controllers for the new LSI controller...unRAID never ceases to amaze me for being as solid and dependable as it is.

now on to consolidating data and disks to pare it down from 15 to 8 disks in preparation for a major hardware upgrade/rebuild in 2018.

On 12/4/2017 at 8:35 AM, tillkrueger said:

that would be nice...here's to hoping!

maybe I'll find the time to head over to where my server is tomorrow and give that a try...I'll be glad when that upgrade is done...maybe I'll finally have far less "failed" drives...I had been wondering why my WD Red drives have been failing at a rate of 1-2 per year...hope that was the reason.

 

The controller would have nothing to do with true drive failures. The Marvell controllers can cause drives to do offline, which could initially be thought to be a drive failure, but that would be ruled out by looking at the smart reports and performing drive diagnostics.

 

If your drives are getting older, more frequent failures might be expected (longer meaning 4 years old plus). Another potential cause is high heat (>45C) regularly, or over 50C even occasionally.

 

Different drive manufacturers and models have differing long-term drive reliability characteristics, some of which are tracked by BackBlaze. HGST had typically shown best long term results. WD distant second, and Seagate about the worst. But this varies by model and size, and may be changing / narrowing with the 8T+ drives. We'll have to see.

you are correct, of course, SSD...I shouldn't have said "failed", but I put those quotation marks around that word for a purpose...they went offline, and that's that.

many of my old 2TB Green drives are 5+ years old, some even 10 years, and have long been due for replacement...thanks to a very generous gift by DanielCoffey (from this community) who let me have his batch of 3TB Red drives for the cost of shipping them from England to Berlin, I have been able to replace those 2TB drives with his pristine, pre-cleared 3TB drives, one by one (rebuilding one as I type this).

I start to see the light at the end of this long tunnel...it's been a pretty rough year of hardware and drive upgrades/replacements, and I am very close to being able to take a break and just let my trusty ole' unRAID system do its thing for a while...until I tackle my major rebuild to a VM capable system.

thanks for chiming in, though...always appreciated.