3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001

[Yw-slayer]

Only around 3 years. I'll check HDD sentinel but they were bought fresh with the CPU which is a 3470, so notnmore than 3 years.

[thesameguy]

I think three years is all backblaze gets out of their drives. Seems about average IME.

[Yw-slayer]

I suppose. Let's see how the Deskstars go.

[thesameguy]

I've been buying those in 4tb lately as well. I think there are seven or so of them in production. They'll never get run to the end, they'll be replaced in two years, but I'm happy as long as they make it that long without a failure.

[Yw-slayer]

Fair enough!

[Yw-slayer]

To try and cut a long story short:

1. I foolishly got lazy and didn't stick in the new Hitachi.

2. One of the two remaining Seagates is now at 9% health(!!) and Windows Storage Spaces has seen fit to "retire" both that and the other Seagate which is still at 100% health.

3. In order to substitute the new Hitatchi and remove either Seagate, I need 6 SATA ports. But my motherboard only had 5 left (since 1 is for the boot SSD) so I bought a Vantec 4-port SATA-3 PCI-E card (very cool and cheap on Amazon BTW. In fact, so cheap that I got 2 of them just in case).

4. However, now for some reason 1 of either the Seagate or the Hitachi drives will become invisible to Storage Spaces in Windows intermittently, causing the repair of the array to fail.

5. I suspect it's mainly to do with the PSU, perhaps too much load on 1 or 2 rails. But I thought that was sort of unlikely? I have no more than 2-3 drives on each cable. I can't find the manual and can't be effed to go figure out which cable goes where.

I suspect the easy way out is actually to build a new Skylake system - which I am going to do anyway - with 6x SATA ports (if I feel like it), stick an M2 SSD in, stick all the hard drives in, sort out the bloody storage spaces there, then stick them back in the server.

amirite?

[thesameguy]

Definitely a weird problem - modern HDDs really shouldn't be any sort of load on modern PSUs... somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30w total split (albeit not evenly) between 5v and 12v. Not a lot of power. A 300w PSU should be able to run most any CPU at full tilt and still support six drives.

Is it possible you have a *flaky* PSU and that's what's causing the whole problem?

[Yw-slayer]

Well, I was about to tell you (as I knew you would) not to reply, but you beat me to it. I fixed it by:

1. Actually listening to the hard disks and noting that it was 1-2 of the Hitachis which were trying to spin up but failing.

2. Swapping the el cheapo Molex to 2xSATA connector attached to the PSU cable for the second Silverstone 1 SATA to 4 SATA connector that I'd also bought alongside the Vantec (the first one was also used for similar purposes in relation to the Seagates which had some clicking problems).

3. ???

4. PROFIT

[thesameguy]

Wha? Bad connectors?

[Yw-slayer]

Possibly. But overnight the repair stopped at 77%. I think something is overloaded and I can't find the other spare PSU cables. After the swap is done I'll remove the Seagates and hopefully it'll be fine. Not keen on looking for the PSU cables (although I'm sure I can find them) or, for obvious reasons, on buying another PSU.