Hi all. Longtime reader, first time poster :-)
My server developed a problem last week where it is constantly dropping drives and I can not get the pool measured to completion to figure out what is causing the problem. I've always had an issue with occasional dropped drive but it's always been a momentary thing and corrected itself immediately but this time it's numerous drives that are falling from the pool.
After some research it seems that the most common things that can cause this are the controller going bad, cables, power supply or damaged drives. I'm not getting any SMART errors showing on the scanner but it's also getting constantly interrupted by the drops. I don't seem to have lost any data so I'm thinking it's not a drive issue. I've checked all my cables to make sure that nothing came loose and have ordered some replacements to eliminate that. Now I'm looking into the controller and power supply. I've checked my event logs and the only errors I'm seeing is the drives becoming unavailable.
I have a question about changing the HBA controller. Right now I have two Supermicro AOC-SALSP-MV8 feeding 16 - 4 to 6TB HGST NAS drives and another 4 drives on the motherboard. From what I have been reading it's common to experience dropped drives with these cards so even though I've been running these for a few years without issue, I'm leaning towards that being the main culprit.
If I were to swap these out for something along the lines of a LSI - 9201-16i, can I just pull the old cards and plug the current drives in to the new cards without running the risk of losing anything? I only have two PCI-e 16x slots on the board so something is going to have to come out.
Any help would be appreciated!
A little info on my system
Norco 4220
Corsair HX850 850W PSU
ASRock Z86 Extreme 6
Intel I7 4770 Haswell
16GB DDR3 RAM
2 - Supermicro AOC-SALSP-MV8 controller cards
Samsung 840 500GB SSD for OS
Windows Server2012 R2 Essentials
20 - 4 to 6TB HGST NAS hardrive for storage 102TB total with 17.4 TB free about a 50/50 split between duplicated and raw folders
Drive Pool version 2.11.561
Drive Scanner 2.5.2.3103 Beta