KempelofDoom
Explorer
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2014
- Messages
- 72
So I'm adding an external case of HD's to my setup. I'm using this LSI card with this Intel expander card. Inside the server, using SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cables to connect the expander and drive controller to SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 adapters. Then use as short as I can get, SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 cables to connect to the expansion case. The expansion case comes with a 1000W PS and what appear to be quality SFF-8087 to SFF-8087 cables to the backplane. The expansion case is SATA/SAS compatible so I went with WD Reds which are SATA.
So I connect and power everything up. I notice issues with creating pools on the expansion case immediately. I figure that I might have some bad drives. I eventually pull the cards and plug them into a different server with similar specs to the main server. I eventually pull 6 drives that were flagged by FreeNAS as faulting. The other drives were moved to different ports when I pulled the "bad" ones to see if it might have been that port on the backplane. The remaining 18 handled the stress testing I did with creating different Z pools and copying over about a TB of data and running scrubs and enabling compression and dedupe over an 8 hour period.
Then I pulled everything and plugged in the 6 "bad" drives and did the same stress testing on them. This time around, only 1 drive failed and the others have worked well except that the current scrub I'm doing is only running at 3MBps instead of the 300MBps I had seen before. Otherwise, they have been holding up well over 24 hours with an occasional drop of SMB which I'm not sure if it's the pool or network adapter.
What I noticed was that I saw errors flying when I transferred data to the pools regardless of the set of drives that were being tested. I would get SCSI Sense errors "SCSI sense: UNIT ATTENTION asc:29,0 (Power on, reset, or bus device reset occurred)". I did a little searching and found that my cables might be suspect.
Since I am using SATA drives, am I limited to the SATA cable length specifications? I think I managed to stay below the 3 feet spec when I combine the cables from the backplane to the controllers.
Should I try to update the firmware on the drives?
Does anyone have recommendations on a quality SFF-8087 and SFF-8088 cable maker?
Any other suggestions on why I'm seeing these errors?
I'm planning on removing all of the cabling and connecting the backplane's to the controllers directly and add till I see errors. However, if I still see errors when it's simplified, how should I proceed?
Edited to fix the wrong case link. Now it points to the exact item.
So I connect and power everything up. I notice issues with creating pools on the expansion case immediately. I figure that I might have some bad drives. I eventually pull the cards and plug them into a different server with similar specs to the main server. I eventually pull 6 drives that were flagged by FreeNAS as faulting. The other drives were moved to different ports when I pulled the "bad" ones to see if it might have been that port on the backplane. The remaining 18 handled the stress testing I did with creating different Z pools and copying over about a TB of data and running scrubs and enabling compression and dedupe over an 8 hour period.
Then I pulled everything and plugged in the 6 "bad" drives and did the same stress testing on them. This time around, only 1 drive failed and the others have worked well except that the current scrub I'm doing is only running at 3MBps instead of the 300MBps I had seen before. Otherwise, they have been holding up well over 24 hours with an occasional drop of SMB which I'm not sure if it's the pool or network adapter.
What I noticed was that I saw errors flying when I transferred data to the pools regardless of the set of drives that were being tested. I would get SCSI Sense errors "SCSI sense: UNIT ATTENTION asc:29,0 (Power on, reset, or bus device reset occurred)". I did a little searching and found that my cables might be suspect.
Since I am using SATA drives, am I limited to the SATA cable length specifications? I think I managed to stay below the 3 feet spec when I combine the cables from the backplane to the controllers.
Should I try to update the firmware on the drives?
Does anyone have recommendations on a quality SFF-8087 and SFF-8088 cable maker?
Any other suggestions on why I'm seeing these errors?
I'm planning on removing all of the cabling and connecting the backplane's to the controllers directly and add till I see errors. However, if I still see errors when it's simplified, how should I proceed?
Edited to fix the wrong case link. Now it points to the exact item.
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