[Solved] Suspecting my PCIe SATA controller to be broken

[Vr2Io]

9 hours ago, razr said:

"Failed to initialize PAL"

So bad, I have same mainboard coming soon. Lucky, I won't install LSI HBA, but I will test it. Btw, you can try tuning mainboard BIOS too. I have an Asrock Z390 ATX board, it work with LSI HBA without problem.

[razr]

You guys are just awesome!

 

Bought some "Polyimid Foil" today from the 3D printing section of an electronics market in my hometown. I used just a tiny bit of it to cover the 5th and 6th pin of the controller. It's so thin it's nearly not visible.

 

After booting up the machine all disks are shown, of course still with the same ids, so UNRAID detected all the disks of the existing array. The one disabled disk from my last parity build was still unassigned. I just assigned it agai and the data rebuild just started.

 

It will take some time. After it is finished I'll report back here, hopefully positive without any read and/or write errors, and then mark this as resolved.

 

Thank you so much, guys!

[JonathanM]

50 minutes ago, razr said:

Bought some "Polyimid Foil" today from the 3D printing section of an electronics market in my hometown.

Kapton is a brand name for that exact product.

 

Now you know how different it is from electrical tape! Night and day difference for this specific usage.

[razr]

3 minutes ago, jonathanm said:

Kapton is a brand name for that exact product.

Yep, that's what I had to find out. Wanted to drop the name here for anyone reading this thread in the future

 

And yep, you're right. This is very different from regular electrical tape!

[Hoopster]

59 minutes ago, razr said:

After booting up the machine all disks are shown

👍 Glad it is working for you.

 

I have found that on many occasions what appear to be hardware problems really have another solution.

 

When I had the same issue, I just searched these forums and, voila!  Someone before me had experienced the same problem and found a solution. 

 

Occasionally, but rarely so, the unRAID community does not have the answer and you have to go search the Internet yourself (perish the thought).   The solutions found here often apply to situations not necessarily involving unRAID specifically.

 

As many have discovered over the years, the community may be the best part of the unRAID experience.

[razr]

Quote

Last check completed on Fri 02 Oct 2020 08:53:01 AM CEST (today), finding 0 errors.
Duration: 11 hours, 29 minutes, 25 seconds. Average speed: 193.4 MB/sec

 

Quickly recapping what I did and what I learned:

* NEVER buy SATA controllers with Marvell chipset

* instead use LSI/Broadcom (or maybe JMB585 chipset)

* in case you decide for a Dell Perc H200 you probably need to "deactivate" the 5th and 6th pin with some "Polyimid Foil"

* unRAID community is awesome

 

Thank you so much! Marking this as [Solved]

Edited October 2, 2020 by razr
recap added