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I own a server on which I run flexraid and since a couple of weeks, I get the issue that whenever the server is doing some heavy operations on the RAID, one or more harddrives get dropped.

In order to investigate where the problems originate from I already checked the following:

  • I'm quite sure the hard drives themselves are not faulty. The S.M.A.R.T checks all succeed, crystaldiskinfo tells me everything is ok and I have already replaced one of those drives with a brand new one, which sometimes also occasionally get's dropped.
  • I thought that maybe the PSU won't be sufficient but don't think that's the case. I have a 430W PSU for a mini ITX motherboard with integrated gpu and 10 hard drives of 5400RPM. After using some online calculators, this should still be fine, also the dropping of hdd is only when doing operations on the hard drives not when they spin up and I have connected them to two separate rails.
  • My final piece I am now investigating is the SATA controller card on PCI express. (which is this one: https://www.conrad.be/p/renkforce-0-10-poorten-sata-iii-controllerkaart-pcie-1374266) Until now all dropped drives were connected via this controller, so I would think maybe the controller is faulty. All other drives are connected directly to the motherboard.

My question now: are the reasoning and deductions I made correct? Or am i missing something in my investigation? Also, do people have experience with the SATA controller card with the Marvell 88SE9705 chipset which seems to struggle with this amount of hard drives?

Jaspack
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  • Drops when HDD is fine usually means a connectivity problem. – Overmind Mar 05 '19 at 12:52
  • What version of Windows is it? And how do you know your PSU is putting out enough power? It sounds like an underpowered PSU is the most likely cause of the problem. – Michael Hampton Mar 05 '19 at 15:11
  • agreed with @Overmind, check your SATA cable for this particular HDD. Also, the PSU is not so powerful for 10 HDD, I usually use 750W PSU for such amount of drives – Strepsils Mar 06 '19 at 07:52
  • Thanks for the comments already! Overnight I linked half of my hard drives to an external PSU and performed the sync again, but got the same results. Also because i never had an issue with 8 spinning drives before, I am starting to think it will indeed be a connectivity issue. As mentioned in the comment, I am going to investigate if the SATA controller is up for the job and not forming a bottleneck. Will keep posting updates – Jaspack Mar 06 '19 at 09:13

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So to make this useful for somebody later on having the same issue; as quite some people mentioned, this was indeed a problem at the level of the SATA controller. It was the SATA controller which dropped the connected drives under heavy load.

Eventually I replaced my old sata controller with this one:

https://www.nowthatsit.nl/dell-03p0r3.html?gclid=Cj0KCQjwjpjkBRDRARIsAKv-0O00dYGZaEgxCrhvmzsVFY4uFDKCYuyLSCLlZWow0Mi0xCIBATwoay8aAvWREALw_wcB

That's a RAID card, of which i first had to change the chipset firmware using this tutorial, to make it just run in JBOD mode:

https://tylermade.net/2017/06/27/how-to-crossflash-perc-h310-to-it-mode-lsi-9211-8i-firmware-hba-for-freenas-unraid/

I installed these components and connected my hard drives via one SAS to 4x SATA cable and now everything seems to be fine. A full verify/sync and sync were performed on the flexraid storage pool.

Thank all of you for the help.

Jaspack
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