External USB drives on powered hub problems.

[skysurf76]

I have three Hitachi XL2000 usb drives in a raidz1 on my freenas and they have been giving me all kinds of trouble. They have failed s.m.a.r.t. tests, and in the daily emails there are a ton of kernel errors about them, and in one it said there were disk read errors. Additionally there have been some network connectivity issues to the shares on them as well.

Anyway, I naturally was never worried that the drives were bad because the error reports were always for all thee drives. Well today it dawned on me that it might be the powered usb hub I'm using that could be causing the problems. I specifically bought a highly rated more expensive one just so I wouldn't have to deal with this, but I think Murphy got me again.

I have enough usb ports on the computer to just plug the drives in directly, so I want to try that as a trouble shooting step. The problem I need help with is knowing how freenas is going to handle having those three drives taken off the hub and plugged into the usb ports on the motherboard. Will drives get renamed? Will freenas still be able to see the raidz1 volume? Will it get confused and rename the drives and nuke the volume? Do I need to move all my data off the volume first?

Figured an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of repair.

Thanks in advance.

P.S. Anyone have any advice or tips on how to test a USB hub to see if its the culprit?

 

[ProtoSD]

You shouldn't have any problem. One user had trouble with his drives being recognized when connected directly to SATA ports, so he connected them to USB and they were recognized. Then he created his volume, disconnected them from the USB ports and reconnected them directly to the SATA ports and voila, everything worked the way it should have to begin with. Just my 2 cents...

 

[skysurf76]

Thanks Proto. Swapped them with no problems whatsoever.