Hi Everyone,

 

Yesterday, I noticed Plex was down and went to investigate.  I tried rebooting the server, but I saw that the cache drive was unmountable.  I found a couple forum posts about how to erase/rebuild the cache drive, but I'm not sure if the drive itself is bad.  I ran a SMART report, but I'm not sure if the drive is dead or if it's just behaving weird because it doesn't have a proper file system associated with it.  

 

If the drive is okay and I just need to rebuild it, just wanted to confirm that this link would work for this situation.

 

Thanks very much for your time!

radagast-diagnostics-20190911-1534.zip radagast-smart-20190911-1130.zip

Cache drive is failing, you can try the recovery options after cloning it, though not sure how well ddrescue works with flash devices, but worth a try.

Wow - thanks so much for the quick reply!  Just out of curiosity, were you able to tell that from the server diagnostics or from the SMART report?  If from the SMART report, was it because all the attribute VALUES were 100?  OR was it because there were P's in the prefailure warning column?

 

From this post it indicates that V-NAND or 3D TLC are the preferred types of SSD - is that correct?  I was also looking and couldn't find a size recommendation for the cache - would 500GB be enough for...pretty much only Plex?  This drive looked okay, if that's the case.

 

Thanks so much for all the help and sorry for the billion questions!

12 minutes ago, bonustreats said:

diagnostics or from the SMART report?

Both, I first saw the UNC errors on the syslog, the SMART report confirms the problem, with the failed SMART tests.

 

MX500 is a good drive, there's a a firmware issue with SMART but nothing to worry about, as for capacity can't comment, you'll need to see how much space you need.

Thanks a lot - I appreciate all the help!  I'll mark this one as solved.

So I found out why my cache drive failed!  Looks like a cheap molex to SATA connector melted and caught on fire!  

 

If any other folks see this, please learn from my mistake and use better connectors - crimped connectors or the SATA power cables are better.  I posted on Reddit and a couple people gave some really great information, including a youtube review of another situation eerily similar to mine.