The original post: /r/datahoarder by /u/the_Athereon on 2024-06-17 10:56:41.
Genuine question. How many of you have had a year as bad as mine so far?
5 failures. 1 DOA
Parity 1 and 2 went in January
The first Replacement Drive was DOA
Data Disks 5, 8 and 11 have since failed.
I've been able to recover 90% of the data through the use of my backups and catching the problem in time. But seriously. 6 drives have died on me this year. And we're only half way through the year.
They're dying so frequently that I can barely afford to replace them.
Now. For the details.
Parity Disk 2 had a physical fault of some kind. Reallocated sector counts when from 0 to 256 in one night.
Parity 1 had a controller board failure (This will be a common cause. I've figured out the problem since this happened.)
Data Disk 5 kicked the bucket spectacularly. The Seek Error Rate went from 85% accurate, which is the average in my server due to how many disks are in there. To 1% in the span of 3 days. Making it infuriatingly slow to get any data off the drive but still possible.
Data 8 and 11 both experienced controller board failures. Strange drop outs in connection, hang ups, read and write error flags despite no data corruption either reading or writing. Obviously I couldn't trust those drives anymore.
But this thing is, only 2 of these failures are genuine faults. The other 3 are my fault.
The drives that had controller board failures, at least some of them, were due to how much pressure was being put on the sata connectors when I closed the side panel. Yes, I'm serious. In any other circumstance, the Define R6 would have ample room for sata power and data cables at the rear of the case. But when you have 11 drives and all their cables back there, the thickness of the noise dampening foam presses into those cables and puts dangerous amounts of pressure on the connectors.
I proved this by running read checks on the "failing drives" with and without the side panel on. With it off, 1 drive had errors 100% of the time. With it on, all drives showed the same errors. Errors which disappeared when I removed the side panel... SMH.
So now I need to replace yet more drives, the cables and the case.
My server is a bottomless money pit. It has to be.