September 8, 20187 yr I have six WD40EZRX (five from the same lot) and one of them (all have about 4.5 years on them) suddenly stopped being recognized by its LSI9211-IT controller. I tried swapping SAS to SATA cables, power cables, power rails, and every channel on my two LSI9211-IT boards. One time the broken WD40EZRX showed up, but then I could not get it again. If I connect the strange WD40EZRX to a SATA port on the main board the drive is fine and the array starts on power up. This has been running perfectly since the drive was new in this configuration. Today I powered down my server for about five hours and when I booted back up unRAID said the WD40EZRX was missing. I am temporarily (hopefully) running the drive off a MB SATA port. What gives? Anyone have a thought? I pulled down the menu in unRAID to assign a device and the drive is not there. I'm pretty certain the controller is not seeing it. I cleaned the contacts on the drive, removed the PC board from the drive and cleaned the PC board to drive contacts. I do SMD rework as part of my profession so I checked each pin with magnification and a dental pick for the SATA and POWER inputs on the drive's PC board (all are good). Thanks, craigr
September 8, 20187 yr Author Oh, I also tried two other drives on the odd ball WD40EZRX power and SATA cables and they work fine... craigr
September 8, 20187 yr Author Well, the drive also passed short and extended SMART tests and all SMART data looks good. craigr
September 8, 20187 yr Author Well, I tried backdating the firmware on the LSI9211 from 20.00.07.00 to version 19 and version 16. That did not change anything either :-/ WTF? craigr Edited September 8, 20187 yr by craigr
September 9, 20187 yr Author The only thing I can think to try is a different SAS to SATA breakout cable. The four I have are identical so if the one drive suddenly isn’t getting a good connection with these cables’ SATA terminator... craigr Edited September 9, 20187 yr by craigr
September 13, 20187 yr Author Just to complete this topic, I pulled the drive out of the server and put it into my Windows desktop. The desktop can only see the drive's model number if the PC boots with the drive in (no hot swapping). Disc management couldn't do anything with it nor could using the cmd. However, I drooped it into a TiVo DVR and it worked (only sees 3TB which is normal on a TiVo...). So since the server motherboard controller worked, I unplug all the drives from my server, threw in a 500 GB hard drive, and did a quick install of Windows. Sure enough I then could see the suspect 4TB drive in Windows using the server mother board controller. So I partitioned the suspect 4TB drive for a TiVo while in Windows (this is necessary for TiVo to be formatted in a Windows PC to access more than 3TB of the disc). I put the 4TB into the TiVo and now have a good working 4TB drive with all 4TB. In the server I'm replacing 5x drives with WD 8TB drives. The 4x 3TB drives are coming out, but I first swapped an 8TB for the weird 4TB drive and rebuilt perfectly. Everything is running fine on the sever... and TiVo. craigr Edited September 13, 20187 yr by craigr
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