PhilipS
Contributor
- Joined
- May 10, 2016
- Messages
- 179
tldr; Blue SATA0 port on my Dell T20 seems to have a bad connection and I am wondering if other T20s have this issue.
I ran into an interesting/concerning issue with a Dell T20 system I put together recently.
During testing of the drives, I received some checksum errors on a mirrored zpool on one of the disks. Ran a scrub, all was okay, and cleared the errors. About 3 weeks later, it happened again, and then I lost communication with that drive all together. I replaced the disk, started the system, and the new disk did not show up.
So I shutdown the system, moved the SATA cable to a different SATA port for that drive. Booted the system, and the drive was there. I moved the cable back to the original port (this is SATA0, blue port on the Dell motherboard), booted up and the drive was there, back on the original port.
Needing to track down the issue, I started wiggling the cable while spamming a smartctl -a and found that if I put pressure to one side of the cable near the motherboard, the drive would drop out. This doesn't happen when plugged into other SATA ports. The cable does plug in tight to the blue port. Also, putting pressure on the port itself doesn't cause the failure, only on the cable. I haven't tested this with a different SATA cable, I'm using the cables that came with the T20.
Maybe this is a one off defect - I don't see anyone with this issue when searching the web, but I am wondering if anyone else can reproduce this on their systems.
I ran into an interesting/concerning issue with a Dell T20 system I put together recently.
During testing of the drives, I received some checksum errors on a mirrored zpool on one of the disks. Ran a scrub, all was okay, and cleared the errors. About 3 weeks later, it happened again, and then I lost communication with that drive all together. I replaced the disk, started the system, and the new disk did not show up.
So I shutdown the system, moved the SATA cable to a different SATA port for that drive. Booted the system, and the drive was there. I moved the cable back to the original port (this is SATA0, blue port on the Dell motherboard), booted up and the drive was there, back on the original port.
Needing to track down the issue, I started wiggling the cable while spamming a smartctl -a and found that if I put pressure to one side of the cable near the motherboard, the drive would drop out. This doesn't happen when plugged into other SATA ports. The cable does plug in tight to the blue port. Also, putting pressure on the port itself doesn't cause the failure, only on the cable. I haven't tested this with a different SATA cable, I'm using the cables that came with the T20.
Maybe this is a one off defect - I don't see anyone with this issue when searching the web, but I am wondering if anyone else can reproduce this on their systems.