eman31

I finally was able to do some serious troubleshooting this week end and after changing out all the cables from the backplate to the controller and motherboard I'm cautiously optimistic the issue is resolved. I did lose a couple of very small files but nothing major. I don't know if maybe there was a power surge sometime recently that fried something out or if they all just started going bad I went ahead and threw a new beefier UPS on the server to be on the safe side. I appreciate all the tips and guidance!

I'm trying a burst test again now and it's been running for about 13 hours. In that time, 8 of the 20 disks have dropped out of the pool while testing but I haven't gotten any error messages when they do. Out of the 12 that are left, the four on my motherboard are still connected and not showing any errors so far. I need to check the to see if the other 8 that are connected are on on one controller or spread out between the two. I've been moving things around and lost track of which disks are on which Supermicro controller. I've tried the event viewer but it's not giving me any good data. It does give an error of event 15 on disk when one drops but that is just telling me that a drive is disconnected. I haven't had much time to dig into the case yet. Being an older one, I'm not sure how the backplanes are attached and if they can be individually changed.

Thanks for the reply and the info on the LSI card. I'm using the Supermicro cards as a pass through with no raid and I thought I might just be able to switch them. I tried a burst test but the longest I've been able to keep it running so far is 6 minutes and that's not giving me enough data to go on. I didn't consider the backplane on the Norco. I've been using it since I built my original WHS server back in 2010 so it and the supermicro cards are pushing past 6 years of use. I'll have to figure out a way to troubleshoot that. I'm usually pretty good at figure issues like this out but this one has me a little stumped.

Hi all. Longtime reader, first time poster :-) My server developed a problem last week where it is constantly dropping drives and I can not get the pool measured to completion to figure out what is causing the problem. I've always had an issue with occasional dropped drive but it's always been a momentary thing and corrected itself immediately but this time it's numerous drives that are falling from the pool. After some research it seems that the most common things that can cause this are the controller going bad, cables, power supply or damaged drives. I'm not getting any SMART errors showing on the scanner but it's also getting constantly interrupted by the drops. I don't seem to have lost any data so I'm thinking it's not a drive issue. I've checked all my cables to make sure that nothing came loose and have ordered some replacements to eliminate that. Now I'm looking into the controller and power supply. I've checked my event logs and the only errors I'm seeing is the drives becoming unavailable. I have a question about changing the HBA controller. Right now I have two Supermicro AOC-SALSP-MV8 feeding 16 - 4 to 6TB HGST NAS drives and another 4 drives on the motherboard. From what I have been reading it's common to experience dropped drives with these cards so even though I've been running these for a few years without issue, I'm leaning towards that being the main culprit. If I were to swap these out for something along the lines of a LSI - 9201-16i, can I just pull the old cards and plug the current drives in to the new cards without running the risk of losing anything? I only have two PCI-e 16x slots on the board so something is going to have to come out. Any help would be appreciated! A little info on my system Norco 4220 Corsair HX850 850W PSU ASRock Z86 Extreme 6 Intel I7 4770 Haswell 16GB DDR3 RAM 2 - Supermicro AOC-SALSP-MV8 controller cards Samsung 840 500GB SSD for OS Windows Server2012 R2 Essentials 20 - 4 to 6TB HGST NAS hardrive for storage 102TB total with 17.4 TB free about a 50/50 split between duplicated and raw folders Drive Pool version 2.11.561 Drive Scanner 2.5.2.3103 Beta