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Scanner thinks WD 1TB drives are 2TB when connected to Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8


Nerva

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I had 3 Western Digital 1TB drives and 3 Seagate 2TB drives connected to two Promise SATA300 TX4 controllers for many years with no problems.   Just recently I replaced the pair of Promise controllers with a Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8-port controller, and Scanner is now mysteriously claiming that the 1TB WD drives are 2TB, even though the controller says they are 1TB during startup and Windows "My Computer" says they are 1TB -- at the same time, Scanner claims that two of the drives suddenly have 3.45 GB and 2.85 GB (respectively) in bad sectors that need to be tested.

 

Scanner is also trying to automatically re-test all 6 drives connected to the new controller, but it is taking a VERY long time to scan the first 1TB drive that supposedly has bad sectors.

 

Any idea what is going on??

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Awesome.  
 
And then this was exactly the issue I thought it was. 
In case you're curious, this was the issue: 
 

* Apply the corrected size / bytes per sector / sector counts to the sector map on each service start.
* When correcting the size of the drive, also correct the bytes per sector and the sector count, but only if we can 
  validate the last sector.
* When reading the disk signature from the disk using Direct I/O, use the real bytes per sector. Some drives (like the 
  WD My Passport) will show up, incorrectly, as having 4096 bytes per (virtual) sector.
* When correcting the total size of the drive, validate the last sector before applying the new size. While this works 
  for most drives, some drives (like the WD My Passport) will report an incorrect size.
* If a manual scan was started on some disk, then automatic scanning was toggled on, and the disk that was being scanned 
  manually was not scheduled to scan, then the manual scan could not be stopped afterwards. Also, the service would not 
  shut down properly in this state.

 

 

Basically, the disk "IDENTIFY" command is coming back with the WRONG information.  We were using this info to compute the size, and since that info was wrong, then "we" were showing the wrong info.  And when scanning, it would be addressing non-existent addresses on the disk, and come back with errors... since they didn't actually exist.

 

The above fixes account for the discrepancies and works properly. 

 

Some controller configurations will cause this, but so will certain USB drives.   

 

A very weird issue. :)

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OK, the problem has resurfaced.   I rearranged which drives are connected to which controllers, and moved a 3TB drive onto the Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 8-port controller -- and now all the 2TB and 1TB drives connected to the controller are reported as 3TB drives in Stablebit Scanner, even though Windows correctly identifies them as 1TB and 2TB drives.

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Wow, a lot of these drives are showing up a bunch of times. Something odd is definitely going on here ....

 

 

Also, you have two drives set to A: and B:.  I would recommend changing these.  Chances are, you've noticed that these disks are always active/awake?  That's beacuse Windows is hard coded to check these drives periodically.  Because they're "reserved" for floppy disks. 

 

 

 

And could you let me know what the letters (and models) of the affected disks are?

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I have been experimenting with reshuffling what drives are connected to what controllers quite a bit the last few days -- could that be the cause of drives "showing up a bunch of times"?

 

I assigned my DVD drive the A drive letter and an external HDD is using the B drive letter.   Eventually I intend to attach the external HDD to the router rather than the server.

 

At the moment the Supermicro controller has the following HDD's attached:

 

D - Western Digital 1TB

E - Western Digital 1TB

F - Western Digital 1TB

H - Seagate 2TB

I - Seagate 2TB

J - Seagate 2TB

K - Western Digital 3TB

 

I am planning another complete rearrangement of all my drives in a few days when two more 8TB drives arrive, so please let me know when you're done with comparing that list with the BitFlock info.

 

What I figured out from my experiments is, even the oldest drives are 4x faster than what the Supermicro can keep up with, and the oldest drives do the most work (they're used for short-term downloads and SageTV, while the larger drives are used for storing my blu-ray movie collection), so I'm going to put the oldest drives on the PCIe controllers and the new 8TB drives will end up on the Supermicro.

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Okay.  And yeah, those drives it's reporting 5+ copies in BitFlock, a lot without SMART data. 

 

So something odd is DEFINITELY going on here.  

https://stablebit.com/Admin/IssueAnalysis/27169

 

And if you could grab the logs from the system?

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_Scanner_for_Windows_Error_Reports

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