Since last night I started to have a disk show some read errors. At first I tried to migrate files away from that disk using Unbalance, but that failed / froze. I don't even recall everything I tried at this point, but basically everything I tried, failed. Errors. This morning I have two disabled drives and one drive that was stuck in the middle of a parity rebuild. 

 

Even though I have dual parity, I think i'm in a worst-case scenario right now with data loss.

 

On the most recent reboot, I can't even seem to get Unraid to respond normally - it's sluggish.

 

Am I having a string of old drives failing all at once? or is this something bigger, like my SAS card failing? I don't know what to do.

 

tower-diagnostics-20200219-0904.zip

Can't see what happened to disk13 since it was pre-reboot, but at the moment there are errors on 3 disks at the same time, this suggests more a cable/power issue, do disks 8, 14 and currently unassigned ST2000NM0001_A2_Z1P16K7F0000C229EX7U_35000c50040fbab3b share something in common, like a miniSAS cables, power splitter, etc?

 

 

Yup, same power and same sas cable. 

I took the power cable apart since I made it. All of my ends seem to be fine, but the wires on the feeding end practically fell out when I removed the cap. (From factory)

 

 

SATA splitter should be used for max 2 drives, more than that can easily go over the max 12v rating for a SATA plug, 4.5 Amps.

Ok -- I believe you. 

 

Now that I've fixed that power cable, I've rebooted. My problem is that I don't remember which disks were in slot 8 and 20. And no matter what disk I slide into that slot, it's marked blue, meaning it will wipe it and insert it as a new disk, right?

 

If that's correct, I think I need to do the following:

 

- generate a new config with those two slots removed

- let parity run

- when parity is complete, mount the two problem disks with UD and attempt to copy the files back to the array

 

Can you confirm that's a good course of action, or show me the right way?

 

If the dropped disks are OK, and you can run a long SMART test to be sure, you can do a new config with those disks also assigned, to any slot, then just re-sync parity.

Thank you.

 

To properly correct my hardware issues (too many drives on not enough cables), what do I need to do? Should I be getting my hands on a 4U / 24-bay SAS enclosure instead of my Rosewill L4500 + EVGA PSU?

You can try and get extra SATA cables if it's a modular PSU, or just get a new one with enough cables, a new chassis is also an option, budget allowing.