Assistance with determining if a drive is toast


TSM

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Hello Folks,  Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I appreciate any advice.  

 

The drive in question is a 10tb drive I shucked from an external drive, so unfortunately no warranty is possible.  I'd really like to save it if I could, so I don't have to buy another drive so soon.  

 

I've only been using the drive a little over a month.  Since the beginning it was getting UDMA CRC errors, but I read in a few places that this was likely a problem with cabling or the port.  This drive replaced a very old 1TB drive, which utilized the same cable and port for years with zero problems.  So, I had a hard time believing the cabling or the port was the issue.  And... I'm ashamed to admit that I got lazy about it.  Kind of just ignored the problem.  Everything seemed to be working perfectly fine.  The original rebuild went off without a hitch, and since then at least a terabytes worth of additional reads and writes have taken place. No hiccups that I'm aware of, except for the UDMA CRC errors.  

 

Then on Thursday tropical storm Zeta came through and knocked my power out.  When power returned, all other drives were good, but this one was in "Device is disabled, Contents emulated" state.  I shut the server back down, reseated cable, used canned air to blow out the ports.  Still the same.  It's using an SFF-8087 cable and the 3 other drives connected to the cable are all good.  

 

I could buy another cable, easily enough, just to see if that helps.  I'm afraid to test the cable on another drive in the server, for fear of it causing a problem with another drive.  The server allowed me to run a smart test.  The results are attached.

 

Thanks for your time,

unraid-smart-20201030-0049.zip

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5 hours ago, Michael_P said:

Drives looks fine, tho - have enough power going to them?

Hmmm, intersting question.  Power connector may have been slightly ajar on the power supply end.  I've fixed that, but it doesn't seem to have resolved the issue. 

 

Lets say that the problem is a bad cable, either power or sata, how will unraid respond when I resolve the problem?  Will it just automatically pick up on the fact that everything is good now, and everything will just look normal?  Or will I have to do something to force it to re-evaluate itself or maybe even do a rebuild?

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16 minutes ago, itimpi said:

You will have to do a rebuild to get the drive out of a disabled state.  You can use the procedure documented here in the online documentation (accessed via the Manual option at the bottom of the Unraid GUI) to rebuild onto the same drive.

Thanks itimpi.  Drive is rebuilding now, going to take about a day. It's frustrating that I don't know what the issue really was here, power cable was slightly ajar, but I'm not sure if it was enough to actually be a problem.  I think I'm going to ultimately replace the 8087 cable and power supply cable.  

 

Thanks to All!!

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  • 2 months later...

Sorry, I know this post is a few months old.  I've been kind of lazy in figuring out this problem.  But I wanted to post a reply in case my experience could help someone in the future.  

 

The problem for me ended up being a bad controller card.  I'm guessing the 8087 port on the card specifically.  Card has been replaced, and everything seems to be fine now.  As far as I can tell cabling and drive involved were good.  

 

Thanks to all who provided advice to me.  

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On 1/16/2021 at 10:34 AM, TSM said:

Sorry, I know this post is a few months old.  I've been kind of lazy in figuring out this problem.  But I wanted to post a reply in case my experience could help someone in the future.  

 

The problem for me ended up being a bad controller card.  I'm guessing the 8087 port on the card specifically.  Card has been replaced, and everything seems to be fine now.  As far as I can tell cabling and drive involved were good.  

 

Thanks to all who provided advice to me.  

 

How did you determine it was the controller card? I had something similar happen a while back. Never did solve it. 

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  • 4 months later...
On 1/18/2021 at 8:48 AM, adminmat said:

 

How did you determine it was the controller card? I had something similar happen a while back. Never did solve it. 

Sorry Replying after another few months again.  I hadn't looked at the forums recently.

 

I have 2 dual 8087 port cards in my system.  One night after I still couldn't figure out what the issue was, I said f*ck it, and started moving cables around to different cards, and the issue followed a specific 8087 port connector on one of the cards.  Bought another card, tossed that card in the trash, and things related to this have seemed fine since.  Computer problems always try to fool you.  I got stuck on the fact that I had just replaced the drive connected to that cable.  Surely it was the drive if everything had worked with the previous drive.  NOPE!

Edited by TSM
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4 minutes ago, TSM said:

Sorry Replying after another few months again.  I hadn't looked at the forums recently.

 

I have 2 dual 8087 port cards in my system.  One night after I still couldn't figure out what the issue was, I said f*ck it, and started moving cables around to different cards, and the issue followed a specific 8087 port connector on one of the cards.  Bought another card, tossed that card in the trash, and things related to this have seemed fine since.  Computer problems always try to fool you.  I got stuck on the fact that I had just replaced the drive connected to that cable.  Surely it was the drive if everything had worked with the previous drive.  NOPE!

 

I haven't used the HBA card since either. Or the iStar hot swap enclosures. Or the cables... All going to the trash. Not worth another episode.

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