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Drives go offline during use, reappear on reboot RRS feed

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    I've got a home built WHS boxwith an e-sata enclosure (this one: http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_port_multipliers/scsat10pm.asp) and a SiI 3214-based controller (http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sata_raid_controllers/esatapcie4.asp). During backups, drives will go offline. They typically throw errors in the event log like:

    • The device, \Device\Harddisk1, is not ready for access yet.
    • The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk1
    • The device, \Device\Harddisk8, is not ready for access yet.
    • Unexpected error 0x48f from CreateFile on D:\folders\{00008086-058D-4C89-AB57-A7F909A47AB4}\Commit.dat: The device is not connected.
    • The device 'ST315003 41AS SCSI Disk Device' (SCSI\Disk&Ven_ST315003&Prod_41AS&Rev_CC1G\6&17f24870&0&000300) disappeared from the system without first being prepared for removal.

    The external enclosure currently has 7 drives in it, 6 1.5TB drives and 1 2TB drive. The drives that drop out are pretty random. Rebooting (hot swap reinserts don't help) gets the drives back. The card seems to have the most current SiI driver. One theory is the external array's power supply. It's 300W. Do the new, larger sata drives draw more power than the enclosure might be designed for? The controller is too expensive to just replace to see if that fixes it (and the vendor has replaced that component once). There are a couple of small drives mounted internally, and they never exhibit this behavior.

    Any ideas?

    • Moved by Ken WarrenModerator Friday, September 10, 2010 12:29 PM hardware issue (From:Windows Home Server Software)
    Friday, September 10, 2010 1:59 AM

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    And by the way... for a while I thought it might have to do with server uptime. As a result, the drive reboots every other day now, with no change in the behavior.

    The machine runs an Intel E6550 dual core (2.33GHz) w/ 4GB of RAM.

    The current card driver version is 1.5.11.1 (c) 2005, dated 9/20/2006. I tried installing a seemingly more recent SiI driver today (1.3.20.0, dated 12/26/2006) and the card failed to start, so I rolled back to 1.5.11.1 that's been running since the card was replaced (which Windows found on its own during first boot with the new card).  I may try playing with the raid version of the SiI driver since the current driver is Si3124r5.sys.

    Puzzles...

    Friday, September 10, 2010 3:52 AM
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    Obviously it's related to one or more of: the card, the driver, the enclosure, or cabling. My bet is a combination of several factors: probably something to do with the card (maybe firmware related, maybe driver; note that the driver you're using is 4 years old), and something to do with the enclosure as well; in my experience, not every port multiplier (in the enclosure) works with every eSATA card, even though they're supposed to.

    Tracking this sort of problem down almost always requires direct access to the hardware, which really means you're going to wind up solving the issue yourself. About the only real suggestion I can give is to determine (by disassembling the enclosure if needed) what the first four (0-3 or 1-4) SATA connectors are for each of the two port multipliers in the enclosure, make sure all drives are inserted into one of the corresponding slots, and see what happens. This may solve the issue; if it does, the highest two slots will never be usable with your combination of controller and enclosure. If the issue persists, move the drives connected to the "low" connecters to the "high" connectors and see what happens.

    I'm not on the WHS team, I just post a lot. :)
    Friday, September 10, 2010 12:28 PM
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