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Disks not being detected

snooze

By snooze
in General Support

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snooze Noob

snooze

Posted
Posted

Hello all! I've browsed around and seen others with similar issues that seemed to have been resolved. I'm hoping for some assistance as im coming back to unRAID from a commercial NAS. My build is the following:

 

unRAID : 6.4.1

CPU : AMD Ryzen 7 1800X

Motherboard : MSI X370 SLI Plus "PRO Series"

RAM : Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2x8GB 3200MHz

GPU : Nvidia GTX970

HDD(s) : Shucked Best Buy Drives. WD RED 8TB NAS Drives, 1TB Samsung SSD.

 

The motherboard is currently updated on the Bios, In the settings AHCI is set, no overclock settings in place, and I have a total of 6  x 8TB WD Red NAS /1TB Samsung SSD. All data is currently on old NAS and I've pulled 1 drive from that NAS formatted it and threw it into the new server. I've tried multiple sata ports, and puchased 10 new SATA cables. Nothing is moving forward after hours of hacking at it. 

 

Looking forward to your responses.

 

Thanks!

 

tower-diagnostics-20180221-2249.zip

JorgeB Grand Master

JorgeB

Posted
Posted

No disks are detected:

  

Feb 21 22:33:27 Tower kernel: ata1: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Feb 21 22:33:27 Tower kernel: ata9: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
...
Feb 21 22:33:27 Tower kernel: ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Feb 21 22:33:27 Tower kernel: ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Feb 21 22:33:27 Tower kernel: ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Feb 21 22:33:27 Tower kernel: ata5: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 330)
Feb 21 22:33:27 Tower kernel: ata6: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 330)
Feb 21 22:33:27 Tower kernel: ata7: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
Feb 21 22:33:27 Tower kernel: ata8: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)

They are likely also not detected in the board bios, check there after boot, if the bios doesn't detect any disks neither will unRAID.

snooze Noob

snooze

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  • Author
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Turns out the Western Digital Reds 8TB are not compatible with this motherboard. Just got of tech support with MSI mobo support. Guess I'll have to return this board and find another compatible board with my Ryzen chip and HDD's. Any recommendations?

John_M Experienced

John_M

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That's rather bizarre. Why would they not be compatible since they have a standard SATA interface? Or is the relevant fact the one about them being shucked? Are they actually WD Reds or "Whites"? I've shucked WD Greens from MyBook cases and once the SATA to USB bridge card was removed they worked fine on normal SATA controllers, though they appeared unformatted because the bridge cards incorporated an encryption layer meaning that data written to them whilst inside their cases was no longer accessible once shucked, and vice versa, requiring a re-format to make them usable. I changed to Toshiba Canvio external drives and found that their bridge cards did not use encryption.

 

AM4 motherboards that I personally know to work with normal SATA hard disks:

  • Gigabyte AORUS AX370 Gaming K5
  • Gigabyte GA-AB350 Gaming 3
  • ASRock Fatal1ty AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac

but that doesn't mean they will have any greater success with your particular disks than your current motherboard because they just use the same standard SATA interfaces provided by the CPU and Promontory chip. Have you tried resetting the CMOS? Does the Samsung SSD work with your motherboard?

 

snooze Noob

snooze

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  • Author
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Yeah very weird indeed. I double checked making sure the ports were not bad by testing my 1TB SSD and the Mobo detected it just fine on all SATA ports. CMOS reset as well. I've also formatted the drives and plugged into the MOBO and nothing. :( 

 

All 6 of my 8TB WD Reds are shucked drives from the Best Buy MyBook cases. All of them are "Red" drives although two of them are the all white label of the "Red Drives"

 

I've been looking at the ASRock X370 TAICHI mobo but I'm afraid those drives may not be compatible since i don't see them on the websites compatibility list for SATA drives. I'll take a peek at those MOBO's as well and see about compatibility issues.

John_M Experienced

John_M

Posted
Posted

In that case, I don't think they'll work on any motherboard. My best guess is that they don't have a standard SATA connector at all and that WD have crippled them in some way to defeat shuckers. Just swapping the functions of two of the pins would do the trick. Do you have a USB dock or case - I mean a generic one, rather than the empty WD cases - that you could try?

 

Here's a suggestion. Your SSD is a known good standard SATA device - you used it to test your motherboard ports. Try putting it inside one of the empty WD cases, using the WD bridge card to connect it to a USB port. I bet it doesn't work!

snooze Noob

snooze

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  • Author
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@John_M I've been able to use some of these HDD's on a previous unRAID build i had on an older board and AMD chipset I was using. I just wanted to build a Ryzen unRAID server now at this point. The drives I tested on the MOBO are recognizable in my QNAP and windows laptop. It's a MOBO issue at this point. I was pointed to their SATA compatibility list here https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/X370-SLI-PLUS#support-hdd and the 8TB RED is not on there :( 

 

I tossed the shucked drive cases already so i cant test that out lol.

snooze Noob

snooze

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Update.....

 

Some of the Western Digital Red drives are compatible after all that are not mentioned on the MSI website. The following are some of the drives I've tested. 

 

Compatable:

  • 8TB WD Red - WD80EFZX
  • 8TB WD Red - WD80EFAX

Not Compatable:

  • 8TB WD Red  - WD80EMAZ
sse450 Apprentice

sse450

Posted
Posted
Update.....
 
Some of the Western Digital Red drives are compatible after all that are not mentioned on the MSI website. The following are some of the drives I've tested. 
 
Compatable:
  • 8TB WD Red - WD80EFZX
  • 8TB WD Red - WD80EFAX
Not Compatable:
  • 8TB WD Red  - WD80EMAZ
WD80EMAZ is the only one here with pin 3 issue. Try to cover pin 3. You can find lots of info on the internet about that.
John_M Experienced

John_M

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Now that's interesting. I hadn't heard of that. Here's a nice datasheet explaining the situation. It's simple to fix but it's going to cause a lot of headaches to those who are unaware of it. Your motherboard is one of the fairly new ones, too.

 

I can see this Pin 3 reset feature being useful in an enterprise environment but it's completely worthless in an external USB boxed drive. I'm sure WD have only used it to frustrate shuckers.

JonathanM Grand Master

JonathanM

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Posted
9 hours ago, John_M said:

Your motherboard is one of the fairly new ones, too.

It's completely unrelated to the motherboard, unless the motherboard happens to be providing the SATA power connector as well as data.

 

Purely a power supply connector issue. As long as your power supply, backplane, whatever is powering the drive follows the latest SATA spec that redefined the pins, you are fine. However, many MANY backplanes and PSU's send power on that line, keeping the drive in a constant hard OFF state.

 

Cover pin 3 on the drive's power connector with kapton tape, and it will work fine anywhere a normal 8TB drive will work.

JonathanM Grand Master

JonathanM

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7 hours ago, snooze said:

I'll give that duct tape option a shot tomorrow and report back! Thanks all! :)

Use kapton tape, pretty much any other kind of tape is either going to be too thick, or not sticky enough, or some other issue. Kapton is ideal, it's super thin, doesn't melt when heated, insulates well, has good adhesive.

 

If you use duct tape it's probably going to ruin your wiring harness connector when you force it on to the connector.

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