Catastrophic Failure (Solved)

[SteelCityColt]

So I'm not really sure what has happened or why. I had need to change my hardware and everything was going swimmingly till I was getting no hard drives showing up when I fired up the MOBO/CPU. unRAID booted fine, but nothing was showing up barring the 2 caches drives (NVMEs). Bit of head scratching till I realised having a M2 in slot shuts down the PCIE slot I was using for my HBA. Cool!

Except it now seems 80% of my drives are dead dodo. Out of:

4 x WD 8TB

2 x WD 10 TB

1 x WD 6TB

and a 240GB SSD

I can only get the 10TBs to power up. Everything else is dead. I've tried different cables/PSUs and even getting the original WD adapter from the external caddies and nothing. Weirdly the 2 x 10TBs were plugged into separated power cables so it's not even like they were isolated.

I have a sickening feeling that I've just lost everything, and am seriously out of pocket. Does anyone have bright ideas before I just give up and mourn.

Edited November 25, 2020 by SteelCityColt

[JonathanM]

Begin by sourcing a quality 4 pin molex to SATA power adapter. 

 

Be SURE that the SATA end has crimp connections, no one piece molded where the wires just disappear into black goo, you should be able to see the wires connect to shiny metal in separate slots.

 

Using only that piece plugged into a single hard drive, see if the drive spins up. Don't connect SATA data wire, just give the drive +5, +12 and ground and see which drives spin up.

 

Once you have an update with that test, post back with results.

[SteelCityColt]

Thanks for the reply.

 

These were the connectors I was already using to power the drives. Further investigation after taking 2 of the PCBs off the back shows it looks like 12V fuses have shorted. Going to give it a go soldering a replacement to see what that does.

 

The only thing I can think  of then is either the PSU is faulty, or when I first plugged the drives in, I used the wire from the previous modular PSU. Apparently this can cause issues.

[trurl]

Just now, SteelCityColt said:

used the wire from the previous modular PSU. Apparently this can cause issues.

Almost always will. There is no standard pinout for these cables.

[SteelCityColt]

1 minute ago, trurl said:

Almost always will. There is no standard pinout for these cables.

   I now know not to do this! Learning the hard way. Hoping it's just fuses blown and I have the skills to swap out. 

 

I'll post results of the effort in a few days. 

[JonathanM]

https://forums.unraid.net/topic/88456-catastrophic-hard-drive-failure/?do=findComment&comment=833305

 

[SteelCityColt]

Good news. I narrowed it down to a 12V fuse that seems to have blown on every PCB. So far have managed to remove and solder a replacement on one and the drive is alive and seen again in unRaid. I think I'm back in business!

 

Lesson learned around PSU and modular cables.