HDD Stopped Showing -- Degraded Status

[Hawkins]

Ok, I'll try to provide all the appropriate information. New to FreeNAS so apologies if I miss something.

My current setup:

Dell Poweredge T130
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1230 v6 @ 3.50GHz
4- 6TB hard drives HGST DeskStar NAS 3.5" 6TB 7200 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s High-Performance Hard Drive
OS Version: FreeNAS-11.2-RELEASE-U1
32 GiB Memory (4 - 8 GiB Memory sticks)
Embedded AHCI Controller
Boot drive is one 32 GB Flash USB 3.0
RAIDZ2

All systems were working fine. I shut down the server because I was installing two additional memory sticks (going from 16 GiB to 32 GiB). When I powered back on, I got a notice indicating that my system was degraded and after troubleshooting, determined that disc "ada3" is no longer recognized. ada0, 1, and 2, are all still there. My Dell runs IDRAC which shows all 4 drives detected but FreeNAS is not detected the 4th drive. Why could this be? This was an issue I had previously as well and I unplugged all drives and plugged each drive in one at a time and FreeNAS recognized the 4th drive that way. What does it mean that to my drive if I finally get it recovered?

Thanks for your help!

 

[CraigD]

Does FreeNAS have direct access to your drives?

Do you have an unused drive showing in freeNAS?

Is your PSU working correctly? Are you using power spliters? drives will drop from a pool if it is getting "bad" power

Have Fun

 

[Hawkins]

Does FreeNAS have direct access to your drives?

I am not sure what this means? I've narrowed the issue to one cable. My server has pre-wired cables in pairs -- 1 pair is HDD0 and HDD1 and the other Pair is HDD2 and HDD3. It seems the server/IDRAC recognizes the drive plugged into the HDD1 slot but FreeNAS doesn't. I swapped the drives in HDD1 and HDD0 and noted that HDD1 is not showing up in FreeNAS. As to why the drive shows up in Bios/MoBo but not FreeNAS is beyond me. It's been functioning fine for well over 3 months.

Do you have an unused drive showing in freeNAS?

No the drive is gone altogether in FreeNAS

Is your PSU working correctly? Are you using power spliters? drives will drop from a pool if it is getting "bad" power

Not sure how to tell this. I think it's working correctly. I am not using anything that didn't originally come with the server. The server allows for 4 HDD's and 4 sticks of memory. As mentioned, I had this issue initially but it resolved itself as I plugged in each drive individually and rebooted the server. Not so lucky this time. I did call Dell and they are sending me out a new HDD0 and HDD1 paired cord. Hopefully it's just a faulty cord.

 

[Evertb1]

I am not sure what this means? I

FreeNAS uses the ZFS file system. All "raid" like things are handled by ZFS in the software. In order to make that happen FreeNAS/ZFS needs to control the harddisk operations directly. Any (embedded) controller configured for any form of a RAID configuration will cause problems. That's the reason why so many FreeNAS users have an HBA (Host Bus Adapter), flashed to IT mode, to connect their harddrives. If your embedded controller is not configured for RAID you should be OK for that aspect at least.

 

[Hawkins]

FreeNAS uses the ZFS file system. All "raid" like things are handled by ZFS in the software. In order to make that happen FreeNAS/ZFS needs to control the harddisk operations directly. Any (embedded) controller configured for any form of a RAID configuration will cause problems. That's the reason why so many FreeNAS users have an HBA (Host Bus Adapter), flashed to IT mode, to connect their harddrives. If your embedded controller is not configured for RAID you should be OK for that aspect at least.

I understand now and thanks for the explanation. The server does not have an embedded controller. In fact, when Dell tried to help understand the issue, they even noted I have no controller which made it more difficult for them to troubleshoot.

 

[Evertb1]

The server does not have an embedded controller.

Embedded AHCI Controller

I think an AHCI controller qualifies as a Sata controller. And your HDU's must be connected to something. I have looked at some pictures of Dell T130 motherboards but I could not find much in the sence of Sata connectors. On most of those pictures I see just 2 Sata connectors.

I am not very familiar with the Dell servers but I believe that the T130 possibly was delivered with one of these RAID controllers: PERC S130, PERC H330, PERC H730, PERC H830. As far as I know these are all purely raid controllers and not of any use for FreeNAS as they can't be flashed to IT mode. Again as far as I know, because I did not exactly made a study of it.

If your problem is caused by the controller your disks are connected to, you can find a solution for that without breaking the bank. A second hand HBA that can be flashed to IT mode is easy to find and does not need to be expensive.

I know there are plenty Dell Poweredge owners within the forum so maybe one them is able to help you out if that cable does not do the trick. In the meantime you can search the forum with the keyword "T130". You will find enough hits to keep you occupied for some time.

 

[Hawkins]

I am not very familiar with the Dell servers but I believe that the T130 possibly was delivered with one of these RAID controllers: PERC S130, PERC H330, PERC H730, PERC H830. As far as I know these are all purely raid controllers and not of any use for FreeNAS as they can't be flashed to IT mode. Again as far as I know, because I did not exactly made a study of it.

If your problem is caused by the controller your disks are connected to, you can find a solution for that without breaking the bank. A second hand HBA that can be flashed to IT mode is easy to find and does not need to be expensive.

I know I don't have a RAID controller as when I customized the Dell, I specifically excluded one based on some advice and input from the forums. It's just odd how I had this problem when I originally set up the server, it was resolved within FreeNAS by installing one HDD at a time and rebooting (because BIOS is recognizing all HDD's). I shut down the server to install two memory sticks and now I am having the same issue. I hope it is a wiring problem; but i guess time will tell.

 

[SweetAndLow]

I know I don't have a RAID controller as when I customized the Dell, I specifically excluded one based on some advice and input from the forums. It's just odd how I had this problem when I originally set up the server, it was resolved within FreeNAS by installing one HDD at a time and rebooting (because BIOS is recognizing all HDD's). I shut down the server to install two memory sticks and now I am having the same issue. I hope it is a wiring problem; but i guess time will tell.

Try a different os just to test things. Ununtu live disk works great.

 

[Hawkins]

Try a different os just to test things. Ununtu live disk works great.

I'll look into this if the new wire doesn't work.