NTFS Drive Woes

[DavidHasEdge]

Hey guys,

I'm new to FreeNAS however not all that new to Linux/Unix. Anyhow, I just purchased some hardware to setup a new media server on and decided on FreeNAS as my OS. It's a Xeon E3 1245 v2, Supermicro board, 16GB of ECC DDR3. I'm booting off of USB flash and my ZFS pool is two 1TB sata drives connected directly to my motherboard in AHCI mode.

Ok, so, the meat and potatoes of my media center is two 4TB Seagate USB 3.0 HDDs. Both have nearly 3TB of space used, 1TB available. I've not been backing these up, yet, I plan on it eventually however nothing on there I would be too terribly upset about if I lost. It would suck but could be rebuilt. I have a USB 3.0 card in my server that FreeNAS sees, I added the turntable and turned on USB 3.0 support. The drives showed up and I was able to import them.

Then things got weird. I started getting random reboots. After fiddling with it for a while I decided to crack the external cases open and connect them directly to my SATA. Before doing so I ran a chkdsk in Windows and safely removed them. I connect them up to FreeNAS and no more reboots! FreeNAS is stable again. Both drives are seen by FreeNAS and I go to import the NTFS again.

Here comes the current issue, it sees one 4TB partition to import and one 500GB partition to import. I can verify there is no 500GB partition available. And the 4TB partition will never actually import. I disconnected them, connected them back to Windows via USB, did the chkdsk and safe removal, booted them back up in FreeNAS... same thing.

So, what would you recommend as my next step?

Thanks!

 

[DavidHasEdge]

So I've made some progress for anyone who's interested. I decided to boot up the server to a WinPE disc so that I could see what FreeNAS is seeing the drives as. Turns out, when connected directly to the SATA controller, those drives have a very funky foreign partition layout. If I disconnect the drives and then plug them back up via the Seagate USB controller of the cases they were in, then they show up fine. I've never seen a SATA to USB controller act like this before but oh well. I tried connecting them via USB 2.0 and the system is stable and works fine. I've mapped them to my Plex Jail and all is working well for the time being. My long term fix is to get two more 4TB drives, add them to a ZFS, copy the data over, clear out the current drives and add a mirror to the new ZFS that I created. Also, I'll research and fiddle with installing a new USB 3.0 driver to try and make that controller stable.

 

[cyberjock]

Well, your title starts off with the problem.. NTFS is not meant to be used on FreeNAS except to move data to the server.

Also if you read around you shouldn't be using USB long-term and USB3 is not enabled by default because it's *very* well known to be flaky with some USB3 chipsets. It's just not reliable and not fit for a high-end file server such as a FreeNAS server.

All of these things are things you should have known before you created your FreeNAS server. I'd take this as a warning that you should do some more research before going further.

 

[DavidHasEdge]

Well, your title starts off with the problem.. NTFS is not meant to be used on FreeNAS except to move data to the server.

Also if you read around you shouldn't be using USB long-term and USB3 is not enabled by default because it's *very* well known to be flaky with some USB3 chipsets. It's just not reliable and not fit for a high-end file server such as a FreeNAS server.

All of these things are things you should have known before you created your FreeNAS server. I'd take this as a warning that you should do some more research before going further.

I've got my long term goals to make everything work to best practices and like I said, the data on those drives isn't something I'd lose sleep over. It's working great now and hopefully will continue until the 8TB of space I need to copy everything to will get to me in the mail. Thanks.

 

[DavidHasEdge]

Well, your title starts off with the problem.. NTFS is not meant to be used on FreeNAS except to move data to the server.

Also if you read around you shouldn't be using USB long-term and USB3 is not enabled by default because it's *very* well known to be flaky with some USB3 chipsets. It's just not reliable and not fit for a high-end file server such as a FreeNAS server.

All of these things are things you should have known before you created your FreeNAS server. I'd take this as a warning that you should do some more research before going further.

And, to add to my last reply, no amount of prior research of FreeNAS would have informed me that the Seagate SATA to USB controller would do such an odd thing as not allowing access to your data when the drive is connected directly to a SATA port. That was what my original question was. My taking the USB totally out of the equation was logical and per FreeNAS best practices but it didn't work because of the Seagate partitioning issue which I eventually figured out and then posted my findings to help anyone else who might experience it in the future.

Your attitude of "You clearly haven't read the documentation so go RTFM" is extremely unhelpful and discouraging to those seeking help for a valid reason that's not going to be addressed by any amount of reading the manual as NTFS was not my issue nor was USB 3.0 (aside from system instability but I took it out of the equation long before creating this thread).

 

[Ericloewe]

Some USB-SATA bridges used in some newer external HDDs (Seagate and WD so far, from what I can tell) encrypt the drives, transparently decrypting them if nothing is configured (there's some Windows software that controls that behavior).

 

[DavidHasEdge]

Some USB-SATA bridges used in some newer external HDDs (Seagate and WD so far, from what I can tell) encrypt the drives, transparently decrypting them if nothing is configured (there's some Windows software that controls that behavior).

I'm thinking something to that effect is likely the issue but what I saw from WinPE with the drives hooked up was pretty strange. One of them showed up as 4TB partition that wasn't formatted, so, ok that makes sense that some sort of encryption is in play however the other one showed up as 4 separate partitions, 3 of which were blank and one not formatted. I should say that I ran DISKPART on both of these drives and completely wiped everything out prior to ever using them so no software encryption should be in place. Best I can figure is some sort of hardware encryption in the USB to SATA bridge.