Unraid Killed 4 Drives.


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Hi, 

I have had my unraid server for about 2 years now. I have WD Red Drives, and a Hitachi drive as my parity drive. About 6 months ago, my server notified my that one of the drives had failed. I bought a new drive and sent the old one back to WD for repair. However I did not get very far. About 5 minutes into the rebuild process, the system indicated that the new drive had also failed(Red X). This process has happened 4 times now. I have either bought new or replaced with refurbished drives sent from WD and the data rebuild fails. Today, I went out and purchased a BRAND NEW 2TB WD RED Drive and installed it with the same problem. What is going on? This has to be an unraid problem because 4 drives bought over 6 months from different sources cannot all be faulty. Attached is everything that is in my diagnostics folder. Hopefully this is enough. 

 nancenas-diagnostics-20171231-1954.zip 

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7 minutes ago, rnance said:

the system indicated that the new drive had also failed(Red X).

That doesn't necessarily mean the drive failed, only that a write could not be completed to the drive. That can be caused by many things, drive failure is only 1 possible cause. Normally you will see smart errors on a failing drive.

 

Given your history, I would suspect either bad power or SATA cabling, or a marginal power supply. Also could be a bad controller. I seriously doubt you had that many drive failures in that period of time unless you were moving your server around while it was powered up and drives spinning.

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I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but you have generated yourself - and WD - a significant amount of cost because you have come to the wrong conclusion when analyzing your situation.

 

It's possible the first drive did fail. But there is no way all of the drives have failed. Especially since there is no indication that the problem is caused by the disk itself.

 

My guess is that the SATA cable is bad, or that the specific port on the disk controller is bad. So feel free to connect 10 different drives - you are just likely to get 10 different drives to disconnect after a while since the error isn't with the drive and so isn't solved by replacing drives.

 

Start by either getting a new SATA cable or see if you have any different SATA port you can use.

Edited by pwm
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13 hours ago, pwm said:

Start by either getting a new SATA cable or see if you have any different SATA port you can use.

 

I would actually do both at the same time.  (Based on the high cost of SATA data cables!   9_9 )  IF you don't have a spare port, you could use the port the cache drive is currently on. 
 

Have you read this from WD?

     https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=10477

 

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Just now, Frank1940 said:

 

I would actually do both at the same time.  (Based on the high cost of SATA data cables!   9_9 )  IF you don't have a spare port, you could use the port the cache drive is currently on. 
 

Have you read this from WD?

     https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=10477

 

The cable cost is low.

 

But it might be good to know if it's just the cable or if it's the port itself.

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1 minute ago, FreeMan said:

 

psst... I think you missed the sarcasm... ;)

Not really. It's just that as a software developer, I prefer to introduce one change at a time so I actually know which change that actually mattered. Switching port and replacing cable at the same time means it would be impossible to know if the previous port is good or bad - which is important if the machine is later intended to be updated with one more disk.

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15 minutes ago, pwm said:

Not really. It's just that as a software developer, I prefer to introduce one change at a time so I actually know which change that actually mattered. Switching port and replacing cable at the same time means it would be impossible to know if the previous port is good or bad - which is important if the machine is later intended to be updated with one more disk.

valid point

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