Ratdude's bad HDD day

[goodpsusearch]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

Ratdude's bad HDD day --> Ratdude's bad PSU day

[keeney123]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

you know what my views are on building big workstations with used parts. Workstations aren't supposed to be cheap for a reason.

But look at all the fun You are missing out on. HA ha

[Topcat]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

you know what my views are on building big workstations with used parts. Workstations aren't supposed to be cheap for a reason.

I never parted ways with one that was in non-working condition.... My home workstation will be 6 years old come february....running 24/7/365 the whole time. Gotta love good hardware! I haven't build them out of used parts, but I do have one that was built on a "new old stock" motherboard, and the board was questionable/untested when I got it....infact I'm typing this post from it now. It's a good 4+ years old running 24/7/365 as well, not a single hiccup.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

Today the four Western Digital WD740GD's (74GB 10K SATA) in my main workstation took a crap at the same time. ALL 4 OF THEM!

What's happened is the RAID controller now and them would occassionally hiccup; it would freeze (solid HDD light) and I'd hard reboot, with the 3ware 9550sx missing from BIOS. Hard reboot again, it would show up, and I'd have to go into BIOS to re-add it to the boot list. Hadn't done this to me in months. So today, I go to reply to a thread on another forum, it does this, fine, rinse and repeat, all seems well. I go snap some pictures (soldering samples for another, err, project) and long behold, the system is running VERY slow, not getting me to a login screen (as the screen is set to auto-lock). I put it to sleep, wake it up, get a login screen, it's running again... yay... wait... BSOD!

Anyway, the card reports all 4 drives with a status of "drive error" Rescanning in the 3ware boot menu doesn't change it, nor did swapping the RAID cards (I have two other 9550sx's in other builds not in service). I reseated all my cabling too... all 4 seem to be 100% dead (either SMART or not responding to controller commands as per the 9550 manual).

Very odd... I know Topcat used to run a very similar setup (Tyan S2895 Thunder K8WE with a 3ware 9550 and SLI'd GPUs) and AFAIK he never had anything like this happen...

Anybody whose used 3ware cards seen this happen before? It's very strange that all 4 would fail the same way at the exact same time... unless it's some bizzare cascading failure?

Sounds more like the HDD boards got killed, likely at least a diode or the like... But that's more like I expect with a poco problem or a T-storm.

Gee, they shouldn't all fail like crappy halogen light bulbs!

They remind me of the halogen light bulbs the new bathroom off the kitchen has, which are over the sink. All 4 of them, installed in summer, 2015, IIRC, failed within just roughly 5 months.

[kaboom]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

But that's more like I expect with a poco problem or a T-storm.

Because all HDD PCBs are directly connected to the AC line...


All this time I thought they were behind power supplies- SMPSes or otherwise.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

All this time I thought they were behind power supplies- SMPSes or otherwise.

Yes, they are and PSUs should prevent stray spikes from getting there.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

Sounds more like the HDD boards got killed, likely at least a diode or the like... But that's more like I expect with a poco problem or a T-storm.

Gee, they shouldn't all fail like crappy halogen light bulbs!

They remind me of the halogen light bulbs the new bathroom off the kitchen has, which are over the sink. All 4 of them, installed in summer, 2015, IIRC, failed within just roughly 5 months.

Somebody didn't read the entire thread before posting... it wasn't the HDDs (they spun up and read data just fine on a USB 3.0 to SATA adapter). In reality it was a croaked PSU (Su'scons that moron here negleted to change a couple years ago, 5VSB went).

[momaka]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

Ding ding ding... The 5VSB is hosed. Pics coming... given that such a HW RAID card with BBU would probably load down the 5VSB a bit, no wonder it took a shit.

I was going to recap it when I bought it... and never got around to it. Now it's kicking my ass. I don't care how pretty their ladies are, screw you SuScon!

Should have known better by now!
I guess you should rename this thread to "badcaps strikes back"

Okay, okay... I will confess: I too have been guilty many times of leaving crap caps behind . So I suppose you could say to me "the pot is calling the kettle black".

Then again, if I was going to spend as much effort and money as you on that rig, I probably would have made sure the PSU is recapped and running top-notch, even if that meant not building/using the PC for a while. Hell, if it was up to me, I wouldn't have even built that thing. Too complex for my liking, and complex things tend to fail a lot more often... but that's a moot point, though.

Also, stray question... but why exactly do you have two video cards in SLI when you don't (at least not to my knowledge) play any games? Seems just like a waste of power and unnecessarily adding heat inside the case.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

Then again, if I was going to spend as much effort and money as you on that rig, I probably would have made sure the PSU is recapped and running top-notch, even if that meant not building/using the PC for a while. Hell, if it was up to me, I wouldn't have even built that thing. Too complex for my liking, and complex things tend to fail a lot more often... but that's a moot point, though.

Also, stray question... but why exactly do you have two video cards in SLI when you don't (at least not to my knowledge) play any games? Seems just like a waste of power and unnecessarily adding heat inside the case.

The same reason why people build show cars/trucks. Also the same reason why "can" and "should" are two different words.

-----

Recapped the PSU tongiht. I have pics but I won't be uploading them for a bit. Sadly it seems my data is trashed... luckily the hard to replace bits are already on my server (which runs hardware RAID 5 with a hefty BBU).

The current plan: I'm going to hard-wipe the HDDs with the USB adapter and see if the card reconizes them then. I hate doing that but if they're corrupted, they're corrupted. If that fails I'll hook up a spare drive to the RAID card and see if that is read OK... if not, then I must have two fried cards...

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

Just to be safe, I plugged in the spare drive before comitting to wiping my drives. It showed up as available which means either the HDDs are corrupted or they're fried. Let's hope they're just corrupted...

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

Apparently "Drive error" is an array type that must be deleted in order to allow the disks to be re-made into an array. Oddly once deleted, unless one immediatly creates a new array with said disk(s), the "array"/status comes back and must be re-deleted.

That said, I hooked one of the drives to another system and verified that SMART is happy (my parent's main HDD, not so much, looks like I know what to get them as a late xmas gift). Re-did the array; installing windows 7 now...

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

Posting from it now... she runs!

[momaka]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

The same reason why people build show cars/trucks.

I know. I know.

Still, to me it seems like building your dream race car and only using it to go to the grocery store.

Anyways, I guess my mind is too practical/utilitarian to understand that logic.

Posting from it now... she runs!

Good job!

[stj]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

That's why I don't use raid any more, I don't care if you have a bbu, stupid shit like this is going to happen and your raid controller is not going to be able to fix it. Which is why I have moved to ZFS, so even if my HBA sas cards go bad, I can simply swap them out and power up and have minimal to non-existent data loss. I don't lose X amount of data because the raid was not able to resilver a platter or fix a U.R.E or lose the whole array due to a hardware failure.
It doesn't stop data corruption due to faulty ram or bad power supply, but it will tell you when there is and what files/directories are affected.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS

Seriously, start using it.

gotta have some of that - i'll try it on the next install i do.

[ratdude747]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

I know. I know.

Still, to me it seems like building your dream race car and only using it to go to the grocery store.

Anyways, I guess my mind is too practical/utilitarian to understand that logic.

Or I am just that nutty. If I lived in a small town, I'd be the guy driving a restored Ford Model A to the store... Just because I could.

[momaka]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

If I lived in a small town, I'd be the guy driving a restored Ford Model A to the store... Just because I could.

Hey, me too!

[stj]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

if i had the money i'd be the one driving an 8x8 APC to the store
anybody got 30,000Euro to spare?

[shovenose]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

if i had the money i'd be the one driving an 8x8 APC to the store
anybody got 30,000Euro to spare?

If I had that much money to spend on something pointless I'd be the moron with the massive lifted truck with huge tires that never goes off road

[rhomanski]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

Around 1989 or so, a Volkswagen Beetle pulled up next to me at a stoplight. It was in Mountain View California, about 10 PM. It had a pipe coming out of the right rear wheel well and one out of the left rear wheel well, about 6 feet high, exhaust and intake I suppose. Painted camouflage and jacked up like a monster truck. It looked brand new at the time. I wondered if it was a tongue in cheek build or if the owner was serious.

[stj]

Re: Ratdude's bad HDD day

an apc is far from pointless.

they are armoured against .50cal - sometimes more, can drive over or through anything, and the good ones are aquatic so rivers or flooding arent a problem.

combine that with the way the world is heading and it's actually a good investment,.