Failing drive? Do any of you know?

I would start worrying when reallocated sector count will start growing. It may be that Seagate has such crappy SMART data (comparing to WD).

Did you run fsck on that drive?

Maybe you could try to reformat it?

Nah. I haven’t made it that far. I was hoping not to have to replot it. I added a second Dell H200e today, so I shut the machine down, installed the card and a new row of disks and when I fired it back up, I started having this issue. I haven’t done anything to it. Pulled the logs and posted here.

Check power plug and change SATA lead ? If not it’s the drive …

As a PC tech for many years my first advice would be to double check all the wires/connections, especially as you just finished setting up some new hardware.

Do you think it could be coming from inadequate power? How many drives should I be running on a 400w supply??? I currently have 9 drives on this power supply. I think it could potentially be the data power connectors that I bought.

There is a lot of discussion and some disagreement on that.

From what I gathered a 400W PSU may not be adequate for more than 7 or 8 HDDs, if that, depending on what else you are powering.

If you are pushing the PSU too hard then brown outs and problems when HDDs turn on together and cause a power spike can occur.

This thread covers the issue reasonably well:How many HDD's can one system actually handle - #17 by juicykrypt555

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All I am powering with the 400W PSU is the drives, & 2 120MM fans to keep them cool. I figured with that PSU, I’d probably be able to power close to 20 drives??? I may be wrong though… I haven’t noticed any weird power issues… I’m about to go to Best Buy and pick up 25 more 14’s though, so I guess we’ll know soon enough…

There are reddit threads that suggest 20 might be possible, but I think you would be pushing your luck.

Before you go you might want to use this tool: https://pc-builds.com/psu/

Be well! :sunglasses:

I recently experienced a power/HD related issue. With a Ryzen 3600, GTX 970, and 5x 3.5" drives, one was acting up, making noises, failing to recognize, for all intents and purposes acting as a bad drive. It was a 14tb Seagate amonst WDs. 1st thought was ($hit) wasted $ on an EBay drive, 2nd was brand drive incompatibility (what?), but then I took it to my plotting PC, no issue. My Segotap 600 watt Gold PS apparently wasn’t up to the task. Go figure, maybe just the wiring, who knows?

Bought a JOB chassis for the rest of the HDs, much nicer, portable, separate PS, and no issues since.

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Yeah. I was thinking about going the JBOD rought anyways. I just have everything in a spare bedroom. I don’t wanna listen to wide open JBOD fans all the time. It’s already pretty loud with my dual e5 2690 v2 plotting all the time. Don’t wanna add another machine with fans @ 100% all the time.

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Disks use different amounts of power at different times - the 3 most frequent types of activities in order of most power hungry to least are:

  • Startup
  • Active
  • Idle

Startup only happens once of course, and Active is very lightly used for just farming, but if you are copying lots of plots to different disks at once, your power usage will be noticeably higher.

Another vote here for “more power.” You literally can not have too much power, but you can absolutely have too little of it, and too little of it will cause weird problems like you describe and will eventually kill the drives in my experience (if it is constantly trying to spin-up and then dies because it can’t get enough power, but then it tries again, and so on - lots of wear).

Power supplies are SO CHEAP compared to the cost of your drives and keeping them nice and fully satisfied. You want those drives to last for years - keep them well-fed and cool! Power supplies also live longer if they are not at capacity all the time - the more power supplies you have, the cooler they will each run because they won’t have to work as hard. Don’t skimp here! Your power usage will be mostly the same overall regardless of how many power supplies you use (up to a point obviously because of inefficiencies) so take care of those drives! JBODs/enclosures that are made for this are the holy grail, obviously.

I really wasn’t pushing for 20. I was hoping to get 16 out of this one PSU. I have trays to put my drives in in counts of 8. I was hoping that one 400W PSU would run 2 trays… I was wanting to try to stay away from having several PSUs running. I guess I should just go ahead and bite the bullet and buy a monster 1200W PSU or something… Not sure how I’d get that many SATA power connectors out of that though…


How loud are the Dell 2u JBODs you were talking about that you bought the other day? I read that post. I know you said you got a good deal on them, but how much were they?

Too many splitters can cause other load issues as well. The wire gauge is only able to handle X number of amps. Same as extension cords at home, lol!

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Exactly what was happening :worried:

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SUPER LOUD. Do NOT get these if you are going to have to be anywhere near them! I’ve seen some forum posts on how to get into the firmware and quiet them down (the command is literally called shutup lol) but I haven’t tried yet cause they are in the garage and I don’t hear them.

The first 9 I basically got “for free” cause I was really buying them for the drives - they all came with twelve 4tb drives and I got the whole setup for ~$7.50/tb. But then I bought 6 more on ebay cause I liked them so much and I think I paid $125-150 each empty. Then you need the drive caddies, which if you buy in bulk on ebay and make offers to sellers you can get for $7-10 each.

It is definitely more of an investment but keep in mind that these things are tanks and will last through several drive upgrades as bigger drives come out. They are just dumb SAS/SATA backplanes so compatibility should be good for years to come. They are also completely modular, so if a power supply dies, you just slide it out and replace it while the redundant supply keeps everything running. They each have two controllers and ports as well for redundancy, but a single one works just fine of course.

The only thing wrong with them is they are out of warranty and data center customers can’t use them anymore - they’ll buy the newest models and dump these perfectly working enclosures on ebay. I wish I had understood all this sooner in my journey before I spent so much time on my SATA DIY jbod! But that experience made me appreciate the enterprise equipment all the more.

Yeah, see. These aren’t an option for me. I live in a town house. No garage. I do have a dedicated room to keep my equipment in, but I can’t let it get too loud, cause if the girl aint happy, nobody’s happy! I assume that most ALL JBODs run this way too! This is why I decided to go the route that I did. Pictures above. I was just gonna stack these trays all on top of the server. I guess I need to figure out the best way to power them. Probably should also buy an expander to set beside them instead of just buying new H200e cards for each 8 drives. They’re relatively cheap though. Also, thought about buying another 2u server and setting it up the same way. Not sure what I’ll do yet. It’s starting to turn into a bit of a clutter and I’m only 8 drives in!

I think that the answer to that question is more about what card do you have to drive those drives. I have 12 drives sitting on 400W PSU without any problems. However, that mb has LSI controller that staggers drive starts., so the peak (~20W) power draw is hitting just one drive at a time. Once the startup settles down, the PSU doesn’t bother to turn on its fan, as the total load is below 200W.

They’re on a Dell H200e. Pretty sure it’s been flashed to LSI 2008. Looks like it uses mpt2sas driver???

For my smaller (16 HDDs at present in four arrays) I really like the open 4 bay arrays. My favorite is no longer available, but this one still is:

It is 5Gb/s USB 3.0 and you can easily use over ten of them with powered USB 3.0 5GB/s splitters and not need the PSU for the HDDs.

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