Weird behavior with hard drives, not sure if Unraid related.


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Hello, I ordered 3 new hard drives, 1 to replace a failing one and two for upgrading storage.

Replacing the failing one provided no problems, I did it by itself before adding the two new drives. 

However, when I went to add the other two drives, the server would turn on / run, but unraid was not accessible. In addition, it seemed like whenever both drives were connected, the server didn't "properly start up" - for example, when I clicked the power button on front, it instantly powered off with no beeps. When the server is running properly, it has a few beeps and takes maybe 30-45 seconds to actually turn off when you click the power button.

 

So, I tested each Cable and Drive independently, and everything was fine. I plug in Drive A with Cable A, server starts up, WebUI is accessible, new drive exists. Same story when I plug in Drive B with Cable B. So both cables and drives are proven to be OK. However, when I plug them both in at the same time, the server does its weird "improper" startup, and WebUI is inaccessible...

Frankly, my case is an absolute mess of cables and stuff, so i'm not sure where exactly Cable A and Cable B source their power from. I *THINK* one is on the sata rail, and one is on the molex rail, but they both might be on the molex rail? (Using Molex->Sata converters) Is it possible i'm overloading the molex rail? (I know the PSU itself isn't overloaded, I run at ~250Watts peak and I have a 450W PSU)

I don't know what to check, at this point, lol. Any advice would be greatly appreciated..

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22 minutes ago, itimpi said:

How many drives do you have when they are all connected?

11 when it is still able to Launch (7 data, 1 parity, 1 unassigned, 2 cache pool) and 12 when I am no longer able to. I just checked my psu (Evga 450 BT Bronze), and its a single rail PSU, so that idea is out the window. My last thought is that maybe I didn't pay close enough attention, and either Cable A or Cable B was used twice, and one of the cables is the problem after all... I'm ordering a Molex-to-SATA power cable that a different community of server builders strongly recommends, hopefully this will fix the issue.. Though I don't know how it could! If it were simply a bad quality cable, I don't know why the server wouldn't start at all.. 


Edit: With a parity rebuild operation in progress, and two people transcoding Plex, my UPS shows me pulling 280 watts. So I really don't think its an overloading issue...

Edited by ct1996
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