Problem with Seagate Barracuda drive in ZFS

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matto

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I set up a RAIDZ with 4 drives (1 parity, 1 spare). I started a copy and everything ran fine for about a half hour, then suddenly got an error:

ahcich0: AHCI reset: device not ready after 31000ms

This message appeared repeatedly and I could not restart the http server. I had to reboot the machine.

This is my hardware:

3 x 3T WD Caviar Green WD30 EZRX
1 x 3T Seagate ST3000DM001

These are all Sata III drives. I am running on mobo E35M1-I, FreeNAS-8.0.4-RELEASE-p2-x64 (11367)


I believe the error referred to my Seagate drive, but I'm not 100%. So, I removed the Seagate drive and set up a RAIDZ with just the 3 WD drives. So far it's been a day and everything is running well.

Could there be a problem with my Seagate drive? Any way to fix it? I would like to be able to build a RAIDZ with different drives since I can't always get my hands on exactly the same drive quickly. Would be nice to go to the store and pick one up, whatever they have.

If there's a problem with Seagate, am I safe to try different drives?

(I've read that these drives are not recommended for server use because they're single user drives. However, so far they are working well for me. I don't expect significant multi-user use of my RAIDZ.)
 

paleoN

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Could there be a problem with my Seagate drive? Any way to fix it? I would like to be able to build a RAIDZ with different drives since I can't always get my hands on exactly the same drive quickly. Would be nice to go to the store and pick one up, whatever they have.
You're Seagate drive may not be the problem, maybe. Take some time and read through the [thread=1910]AHCI timeouts thread[/thread]. For joeschmuck, [post=20806]post #57[/post], it was as simple as a loose SATA cable connection. Stick the Seagate in a machine, look at the smart data and run the smart tests on it.

If there's a problem with Seagate, am I safe to try different drives?
I wouldn't enable any power managment for your ST3000DM001 if it's still good. Yes, you can try other drives as long as they are the same exact size or larger.

(I've read that these drives are not recommended for server use because they're single user drives. However, so far they are working well for me. I don't expect significant multi-user use of my RAIDZ.)
That recommendation is for hardware raid in particular. ZFS is much more forgiving which is also why mixing drives doesn't matter as much vs in hardware raid.
 
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matto

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Throwing in the towel

Unfortunately I was not able to fix the problem. The timeouts continued on different drives. At one point I changed the BIOS to SATA instead of IDE, and the timeouts stopped for about a day, but then they continued after I recreated ZFS with more drives. I read through all the threads and tried various things but nothing worked. Then I tried downgrading to FreeNAS 7, but there were lots of problems with that, including unsupported network card (8111E), so I had to download/install a driver (not easy). Then it started dropping drives. They would appear during boot up, but then they got lost one by one and then no drives appeared, even after reboot. I could not find them anywhere, so I went back up to FN 8, and the drives reappeared (mostly), and I tried to create simple one-disk volumes, but then even that started generating errors including page faults that froze the system, and so I just gave up. Also, I had a drive that was formatted NTFS, and the system could mount it at first (to copy from), but then later refused to boot up when it was attached. So many problems, which I spent many many hours.

I don't know if the problem was my hardware or my skills, or FreeNAS.

I will investigate other options.
 

cyberjock

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I know seagate drives had a problem with timeouts a few years ago. I had a RAID array with 16 seagates and if I started reading or writing alot of data drives would start dropping like crazy. Short answer I stopped buying Seagates and the problem went away. :)

There's a Seagate thread somewhere in their forums discussing this issue at length. Seagate sells their desktop drives as "Desktop RAID", which Seagate has stated is RAID 0 and RAID 1 and nothing else. Seagate won't do RMA or anything and claims that you are not operating them as intended so they won't help you. I will tell you that I ran diagnostics like crazy and I never could find a "failed" drive. They all passed any diagnostic you could throw at it when removed from the array and tested individually.
 

paleoN

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I don't know if the problem was my hardware or my skills, or FreeNAS.
It sounds like hardware with everything you tried. I would suspect a possible faulty PSU or motherboard from what you said. If you have a spare PSU you could try swapping it out. If it's the motherboard, well you would need a new motherboard.

Good luck with whatever you do.
 

paleoN

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Seagate sells their desktop drives as "Desktop RAID", which Seagate has stated is RAID 0 and RAID 1 and nothing else.
Desktop drives don't do well in a real hardware RAID array. The TLER is set too high on desktop drives vs what hardware RAID expects. If the drive doesn't respond in time then the array will drop the drive because it thinks it's offline. If you are running a mirror or RAID 5 and it does it twice then you lose the array.

The solution is to use enterprise drives for hardware RAID.
 

cyberjock

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Desktop drives don't do well in a real hardware RAID array. The TLER is set too high on desktop drives vs what hardware RAID expects. If the drive doesn't respond in time then the array will drop the drive because it thinks it's offline. If you are running a mirror or RAID 5 and it does it twice then you lose the array.

The solution is to use enterprise drives for hardware RAID.

I agree completely. The problem is most people that have servers at home won't pay the absurdly high prices for lower capacity enterprise class drives. The OP in this thread mentioned he has 3xST3000DM001, which are desktop drives.
 
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