Drive(s) dropping from pool

[klepp0906]

Does this generally indicate failing disks?  Ive noticed on two occasions now ive had 2 separate drives drop from the pool.   A restart didnt bring them back.  Only a shutdown and restart of my jbod/chassis that keeps the disks powered on 24/7 otherwise.

They tend to drop during heavy use (during a snapraid scrub in this case)

just trying to figure out if thats likely the issue before i go dropping the exorbitant cost on a few hard drives that may not fix the issue.   I assume thats its likely but with no warnings from scanner smart or otherwise I'd love some reinforcement or otherwise

[minden02]

Are you using an AMD ryzen system and USB-connected JBOD? You could be having the USB disconnect issue that has affected a lot of users. It should be fixed by BIOS updates and newer chipset drivers depending on the mobo manufacturer but in my case everything is fully updated and I still have USB drive disconnects. I'm going to try adding a PCIE expansion card and connecting to that instead to see if the issue is fixed.

[klepp0906]

pretty much universally no lol.  

intel system and i'm connected via HBA.  It seems to be in high stress situations though, have not seen it happen during general use that I can recall but its pretty frequent when accessing everything at once or under really heavy io

[minden02]

Ah that's a tough one. If the disks SMART readings are ok then my first guess would be the JBOD chassis power supply or other hardware failing. Disk failures are usually more slow moving in that you start to see errors and corruption and will get some warning from the pool. If it completely fails suddenly then a restart wouldn't bring it back.

[Chris Downs]

On 4/12/2022 at 11:56 AM, klepp0906 said:

intel system and i'm connected via HBA.  It seems to be in high stress situations though, have not seen it happen during general use that I can recall but its pretty frequent when accessing everything at once or under really heavy io

Check that the HBA is not overheating. If it's not in a high-airflow server chassis, you'll need a dedicated fan blowing air over it. Had this issue myself once - the controllers have puny heatsinks, as they are assumed to be in a chassis with 6000rpm fans.

[klepp0906]

Hey, good suggestion.  I did find that it was incredibly hot. Holy smokes.  I’ve long since added kryonaut TIM and mounted a noctua to it though lol. 
 

that being said, after a whole slew of drive replacement, recreation of the pools, chkdsks, permissions resets, basically everything I could throw at it. so far so good lol

[muaddib]

I am having similar issues. My setup was working fine until one of the enclosures died.   I bought the same enclosure, 5-bay mobius.  My setup consists of the following: eSata connection, 2 5-bay drives, and JBOD setup. The new 5-bay enclosure keeps dropping 4 of the 5 drives from the system. They all come back after a reboot and then drops during the rebuild of the pool. All of the drives are a year or less old. I ran Scandisk on a separate computer and the drives are functioning fine. I also changed out the eSata cable. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[muaddib]

Dang, still no answer

[Shane]

Can you try starting with one drive in that enclosure and adding more to see when it starts dropping out? Might be a power issue to/with the enclosure?

[muaddib]

I might have it fixed. There is a firmware update that prevents the drives from going to sleep. The new version (without the voltage regulator switch) of the 5-bay mobius enclosure has this feature. I think the drives are going to sleep and in typical Windows fashion cannot reconnect after it wakes up. I will report back later this evening or tomorrow. It usually fails while I am away.

[muaddib]

So far so good, no drives have dropped since my earlier post.

[CyberSimian]

9 hours ago, muaddib said:

I think the drives are going to sleep and in typical Windows fashion cannot reconnect after it wakes up.

Three years ago I tried using DrivePool with a set of five Western Digital "My Book" USB drives. The problem was that one of them kept dropping out of the pool. And yet, when unplugged, replugged, and CHKDSKed, no problem was ever found. In the end I came to the conclusion that DrivePool was not waiting long enough for the disk to spin up, and so claimed that the disk was missing from the pool.

I decided to uninstall DrivePool and manually distribute files over the five USB disks. This has produced no problems with slow spin up in the three years that I have been doing this, so I don't think that it is a Windows problem (i.e. Windows is waiting long enough for the disk to spin up). I think that it is DrivePool not waiting long enough for the disk to respond (spin-up in the case of USB disks whose spin-down cannot be disabled by the the user or Windows).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

[muaddib]

1 hour ago, CyberSimian said:

Three years ago I tried using DrivePool with a set of five Western Digital "My Book" USB drives. The problem was that one of them kept dropping out of the pool. And yet, when unplugged, replugged, and CHKDSKed, no problem was ever found. In the end I came to the conclusion that DrivePool was not waiting long enough for the disk to spin up, and so claimed that the disk was missing from the pool.

I decided to uninstall DrivePool and manually distribute files over the five USB disks. This has produced no problems with slow spin up in the three years that I have been doing this, so I don't think that it is a Windows problem (i.e. Windows is waiting long enough for the disk to spin up). I think that it is DrivePool not waiting long enough for the disk to respond (spin-up in the case of USB disks whose spin-down cannot be disabled by the the user or Windows).

-- from CyberSimian in the UK

I haven't had any issues until one of the enclosures failed. I am glad your method is working for you but I have 10 drives and data management would be a mess if I didn't have drive pool