"Parity disk in error state" when doing parity check

[smcw]

Today I moved my unraid machine to a new case and added a new SATA card (I did not add/change any drives). After getting everything running again, I found everything was working properly. VMs and docker working fine, etc. So I decided I should do a parity check just to be sure and within 15 minutes I got a "Parity disk in error state" message and the parity check stopped. I have stopped the array for now to make sure nothing else can go wrong.

 

I do weekly parity checks and the last one was yesterday with no errors, so I doubt there is any issues with this parity disk.

 

Looking for advice on how to proceed. I attached my diagnostics as I suspect the issue has something to do with me moving cases/SATA cables and not the drives themselves (I hope).

unraid-diagnostics-20200516-2216.zip

[JorgeB]

Diags are after rebooting so we can't see what happened but you're using a SATA port multiplier and those are a known source of problems, not surprisingly parity is connected there.

[smcw]

14 hours ago, johnnie.black said:

Diags are after rebooting so we can't see what happened but you're using a SATA port multiplier and those are a known source of problems, not surprisingly parity is connected there.

My bad, didn't realize the diags would be lost on reboot.

 

I moved the parity disk to another SATA controller, and I'm now letting it do a read-check. The other disks are giving a lot of SATA related errors, so I think you are correct about this PCIe SATA card (ASM1061 chipset). I noticed it seems to be running in IDE mode, would that be likely to contribute to this issue?

 

Edited May 17, 2020 by smcw

[smcw]

The SATA card is definitely bad. I am not going to run anymore with it. The errors went out of control and I don't think there's any reason to let the read-check continue.

 

Does anyone have any advice on selecting a replacement SATA PCIe card to avoid this issue?

 

Thanks.

unraid-diagnostics-20200517-1540.zip

[JorgeB]

10 hours ago, smcw said:

PCIe SATA card (ASM1061 chipset). I noticed it seems to be running in IDE mode, would that be likely to contribute to this issue?

2 port Asmedia is fine, any Asmedia with more than 2 ports is using SATA port multipliers and that is no good.

 

8 hours ago, smcw said:

Does anyone have any advice on selecting a replacement SATA PCIe card to avoid this issue?

If 4/5 ports are enough look for a JMB585 based controller, for 8 ports look for any LSI with a SAS2008/2308/3008/3408 chipset in IT mode, e.g., 9201-8i, 9211-8i, 9207-8i, 9300-8i, 9400-8i, etc and clones, like the Dell H200/H310 and IBM M1015, these latter ones need to be crossflashed.