aje112

I'm going to jump the gun and post my conclusion here: my issues were most likely caused by my add-in controller, even after installing its driver. I haven't yet run the burst tests, but here is a list of events that point to it: When I first built the pool and relocated some pooled drives onto the new controller, those exact drives began to exhibit file access issues. I didn't mention this when I originally posted because I didn't notice issues immediately after doing so. Removing those same drives and reading them with my USB HDD dock exhibited no access issues (nor corruption). When formatting a DIFFERENT set of drives on the suspect controller, the formats would freeze. This was attempted three times. After flashing the firmware, the formats appear to be progressing normally and are further along. (To be clear, updating the DRIVER seemed to make no difference.) Currently, my pool is rebuilt from drives using the onboard controller only. There are no I/O issues. I could have done more to isolate the controller as the point of failure, but at this point, noticing how everything works perfectly fine until it's connected to the Rocket 640L is good enough for me. I guess by shopping for a cheaper card, I paid the price. So far, the fix appears to be to flash the stock firmware. For anyone looking, the Rocket 640L (not to be confused with the RocketRAID 640L) uses the Marvell 88SE9230 controller. I've started a separate pool for the controller to verify controller stability before I let that controller contribute to my main pool. Also, burst tests will be underway soon. My thanks to Christopher for his patience and guidance. To show my appreciation, I've tried to be thorough in this thread in hopes that anyone who runs into a similar problem with the same card finds this thread. - AJ

I actually replaced all the cables. While I was pulling the drives, a wave of OCD hit and I decided to finally get the drives' cables on some consistent color scheme. The PSU is a 450W Seasonic that powers the i3, 8 drives, the stock HSF, and 6 fans. Pulls less than 55 watts under load. I read somewhere to allocate about 10W per drive so I'm thinking I've got plenty of leeway. Will do, especially for the HighPoint card. I reckon I'll go ahead and install the drivers for it too. Once I get the pool up and running, I'll follow-up with some comments on the burst test results and rebuilt pool stability before the end of the week. I really appreciate the time and direction you've given me here. I really want the server to be as stable as possible and you've went well beyond DrivePool to help me think about some things to achieve just that. Thanks!

Saw nothing in the application log specific to the UI. It was the first time the UI ever crashed on me so I'm not terribly concerned about it. Tons of warnings: storahci: Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort1, was issued. disk: An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk2\DR2 during a paging operation. Ntfs (Microsoft-Windows-Ntfs): The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur in VolumeId: G:, DeviceName: \Device\HarddiskVolume6. (A device which does not exist was specified.) I have no idea how the drives are mapped so I don't know which disks "Harddisk2" or "RaidPort1" refer to. However, regarding the Ntfs error, the drive I assigned to G was definitely one of my trouble drives. I ran a couple passes with Memtest86 and they came back with no errors. I'm going to go ahead and run the tests on the drives connected to the HighPoint controller. Wish I'd done this from the get-go. As posted earlier, the suspect drives gave me no incidents when I connected them to my USB dock to recover the files. I suppose strictly speaking, the files needed no "recovery"! I'm staring pretty hard at the controller now, which is why I'm running the burst test on the batch of drives I have connected to it before I explore other options. I doubt the possibility of firmware being the culprit because this happened on both a 5 TB Toshiba (MD04ACA500) and 5 TB WD Red (WD50EFRX). A quick Google search doesn't seem to suggest firmware issues with either drive, but if your experience says otherwise I'm all ears. Also, my laziness is kicking in at this point (after running a memory test, full formats, replacing cables, recovering and rebuilding the pool!); I would like to avoid updating firmware given the higher likelihood that the controller is the point of failure. Thanks for this suggestion. If the burst test comes back with damning evidence against the HighPoint, this will be the first thing I'll do. Again, thanks for the responses.

Thanks for your feedback!

(edited for formatting) The forced drive removal option stuck at 0.5% (a 5 TB drive with maybe 20% utilization) for about 10 minutes, then the GUI crashed. I believe I'll have to skip to removing the drive the old-fashioned way. - UPDATE: I was able to start pulling files off of the drive after removing it from the server. The plan is to do this to all of my pooled drives, format them, then rebuild the pool from scratch. I still have no idea what may have been the cause of my read/write issues. I'm just glad to recover data without the locking up. It's also worth mentioning that at least one problem file that would freeze the pool is fully intact and readable after I pulled it out of the server, so there's no evidence of data corruption. Also, the drives continue to show no SMART errors other than the ones already mentioned.

Thanks for the tip. I researched it a bit and discovered that the 2 TB limitation is due to FreeDOS. I could probably figure out how to make an MS-DOS bootable with SpinRite pretty easily, but I'm going to see if I can just yank the drive and use my HDD docking station to pull files off of it. I actually discovered this same problem (reading a file which causes the drive to lock up) on a DIFFERENT drive that was a part of the pool, and I'm reluctant to believe that both drives took a dump and need to be recovered this way. My replies to Christopher bolded below:

Good morning everyone. When I try to remove a drive, the program seems to work as it shows a burst of I/O up until it hits 0.2%. At that point, it sticks and there's no read/writes being done. I let it stay in this state for at least 30 minutes before rebooting, upon which the drive is still reflected in the pool with no apparent complaints Earlier this weekend, I attempted to remove this same drive and cancelled it at about 0.7% (yes, it seemed to be progressing normally) because of time constraints. The abort didn't resolve after about an hour so I rebooted, started DrivePool back up, and let it resolve some (duplication?) errors. It seemed to carry on just fine, with the drive still reflected as part of the pool. I'm new to pooling drives and I'm concerned that my impatience on the first removal attempt corrupted the pool somehow. There are a couple other issues that have arisen since my aborted removal: Accessing SPECIFIC files from the pool via a networked computer will cause the accessing program, then Explorer on that computer, to crash. Constant writes from uTorrent (maybe 5+ simultaneous torrents both reading and writing on each) after a few minutes causes the pool to become non-responsive. When the pool becomes non-responsive, both networked computers that have the drive mapped (my box and my HTPC) will crash (i.e. if I "induce" a crash via uTorrent from my computer, my HTPC which was streaming from my server that runs DrivePool will follow suit). Any ideas? I'm thinking about pulling the pooled files from the drive's hidden PoolPart directory, then forcing a drive removal, then re-adding them to the remaining pool, and finally re-adding the drive (EDIT: after a format, of course). EDIT: I concurrently run StableBit Scanner, which doesn't indicate any issues. Then again, I'm not sure if it monitors pool health as much as it does SMART metrics. --- UPDATE: I attempted to move the files from the drive's PoolPart and it just fell flat. Canceling the stuck move crashes Explorer, so this pretty much implicates the drive and not DrivePool. It's beyond of the scope of this forum, but if anyone has any suggestions for recovering the files on this drive, I'm game. My important files are already duplicated by the pool and are backed up off-site via CrashPlan. Thanks!