Trouble with Rosewill hot-swap bays; PSU problem or SATA cable problem?


RollinDolan

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Hi all,

I recently moved my Unraid server from a cramped case to a Rosewill RSV-L4412 (4U, 12 Hot-swap bays). The full parts list is at the bottom of this post. The build is largely based on the NAS Killer 4.0 featured build, with some plus-ups.

 

Last night when I moved everything over to the new hot-swap case, several of my drives were not initially found by Unraid, some SSDs and some HDDs. I powered down, re-seated the drives to make sure they were all pushed into the hot-swap connectors fully, and rebooted. This time there were still drives missing, but they were different... some of them were initially available the first time I booted.

 

I thought it could be:

  1. The SAS to SATA cables running from my LSI external card... I did slightly bend/jam a couple of the 12 cables when trying to install everything. But replacing those with SATA cables running directly from motherboard to trouble drives didn't fix all the drives. A couple of them were detected, but that could have been random.
  2. The power supply? 550 W seems reasonable for this use case, but the power supply was bundled with my old case, so maybe it's low quality? One of my HDDs wasn't getting detected, no matter how many times I swapped the cables or re-seated the drive tray... Though it was found at some point during my troubleshooting, so I didn't suspect the slot was faulty. I finally moved the drive to a slot in an empty section of slots (there are three sections of four slots each on this case. I moved this drive to a completely full section to a completely empty section)... and that worked! Because each section is powered by its own two molex connectors, I suspected some power issue? Maybe not.

 

Right now I was able to get all my drives detected and working by a combination of:

  • Changing some SAS-to-SATA cables to straight SATA cables to the motherboard
  • Pushing all my SSDs all the way in to make sure they're seated
  • Moving that one drive to a less populated section of the case

 

But that's only eight drives, and I'd ideally like all my twelve slots to work, and for them to all use the SATA-to-SAS cables as intended. Does anyone have ideas what may be wrong? Happy to provide more info. Thanks!

 

PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/TKRZZf

Motherboard: Acer Veriton M6620GE Intel Desktop Motherboard ($0.00)

CPU: Intel Core i5-3570S 3.1 GHz Quad-Core OEM/Tray Processor  ($0.00) 
CPU Cooler: Thermaltake Gravity i2 31.34 CFM CPU Cooler  ($0.00) 

Memory: 8GB (4GB x 2) DDR3 10600U 1333MHz 240PIN Memory RAM DIMM ($0.00)
Memory: 8GB (4GB x 2) DDR3 10600U 1333MHz 240PIN Memory RAM DIMM ($0.00)
Case: Rosewill (RSV-l4412) Server Chassis/Server Case/Rackmount Case, 4U Metal Rack Mount Server Chassis with 12 Hot Swap Bays ($0.00)
Storage: Samsung 860 Evo 500 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($0.00) 
Storage: ADATA Ultimate SU800 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($0.00) 
Storage: Silicon Power A55 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($0.00) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($0.00) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 4 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($0.00) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 8 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($0.00) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 8 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($0.00) 
Storage: Western Digital Red 8 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($0.00) 
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 960 2 GB SuperSC ACX 2.0+ Video Card  ($0.00) 
Power Supply: Cooler Master Elite V2 550 W ATX Power Supply  ($0.00) 
Case Fan: Noctua NF-S12A PWM 120 mm Fan  ($0.00) 
Case Fan: Noctua NF-S12A PWM 120 mm Fan  ($0.00) 
Case Fan: Noctua NF-S12A PWM 120 mm Fan  ($0.00) 
Case Fan: Noctua NF-A8 PWM 32.66 CFM 80 mm Fan  ($0.00) 
Case Fan: Noctua NF-A8 PWM 32.66 CFM 80 mm Fan  (Purchased For $0.00) 
SAS Card: LSI SAS 9201-16e 6Gb/s 16-PORT SATA+SAS HOST BUS ADAPTER LSI00276 ($0.00)

 

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Just hoping to see if anyone had any thoughts on what this issue could be? I heard from someone that this might be an issue of the SATA or Power connectors being pushed too far back into the case.

 

Unfortunately I'm traveling for the holidays so I can't test it out - just wanted to see if anyone is familiar with this issue.

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I have a pair of 4411s, and I found that certain drives just hate certain positions (I had one WD that didn't like it place in the world, and insisted on being moved, but every other drive didn't care).

 

I'm running 12 drives with a 620W supply, but the one thing I did make sure of was to only use molex cables from the supply, and not use any SATA - Molex adapters (which necessitated me getting another modular cable from Antec)

 

One thing I was very careful about was to ensure that the power and data cables only crossed each other at 90 degrees and that none of my data cables were tied to each other to minimize any chances of crosstalk

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Thanks for the reply. I will definitely look into the 90 degree crossing of the wires when I'm home.

 

As for the connectors - I don't have any SATA-to-Molex adapters, but I do have a few molex Y-splitters. My non-modular PSU only has 3 molex connectors, and I need 6 to power all the drive bays. Does that present an issue?

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  • 10 months later...

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