Cannot see some drives attached to IBM M1015 - partial failure?

[petr]

I am using combination of the onboard SATA + IBM M1015 (flashed to IT v16).

At the moment, I have got 6 drives attached to it and everything seems to be working without trouble. Recently I wanted to add a hot spare to remaining 2 bays, however, I've noticed that no matter what I do, I cannot get the drives to show in FreeNAS. They are the same make/brand and they are brand new drives as well.

My main question is - how likely is it that only part of the ports would not work? How likely is for the card to fail partially? As a next step, I am going to open up the machine and check all of the connectors to be on a safe side but I find it unlikely that both of them would fail at the same time (I am pretty sure I've tested them all when I built the machine approx. 6 months ago).

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

My main question is - how likely is it that only part of the ports would not work? How likely is for the card to fail partially?

I have no experience of the M1015, so this is just speculation.

If the undetected drives are attached to one of the M1015 ports and the detected drives are attached to the other, then it could be the port. If they are all on the same port, then a cable or power issue seems more likely (assuming the drives are good).

 

[petr]

I have no experience of the M1015, so this is just speculation.

If the undetected drives are attached to one of the M1015 ports and the detected drives are attached to the other, then it could be the port. If they are all on the same port, then a cable or power issue seems more likely (assuming the drives are good).

There are some drives attached to the same port where the 2 non-functioning ones are connected to. Power is also fine I think - the drives spin up and light up (it's in an enclosure). Will try the actual cable now, it does sound weird that only 2 of the channels would be dead...

 

[Robert Trevellyan]

it's in an enclosure

Another thing you can try is switching drives around to see if the problem follows the drive or stays with the tray.

 

[Ericloewe]

The most common sources of problems are the stuff between controller and device: cables, backplanes and the like.