Hard drive works when plugged into PC, but not Server

[TFS_Rein]

Hi All!

I have a 3TB WD Drive that does not show up when plugged into my freenas server. I Hear it spin up when I plug it in, but it is never detected. I even ran 'camcontrol rescan all' with no success. I have hotplugged other drives into this enclosure and even the same slot and they all work fine.

I am running an HP DL180 G6 with plenty (48GB) of ECC Memory and latest version (9.2.1.7)

However,
If I plug it into my windows box, it shows up in device manager (with no readable partition of course). To test, I formatted it NTFS and was able to copy data to it. So the disk is fine.

I plug it back into my enclosure and spins up, but never detected. Any Ideas?

Thanks for any help!

 

[cyberjock]

Maybe the disk isn't compatible with your disk subsystem?

 

[Z300M]

Hi All!

I have a 3TB WD Drive that does not show up when plugged into my freenas server. I Hear it spin up when I plug it in, but it is never detected. I even ran 'camcontrol rescan all' with no success. I have hotplugged other drives into this enclosure and even the same slot and they all work fine.

I am running an HP DL180 G6 with plenty (48GB) of ECC Memory :) and latest version (9.2.1.7)

However,
If I plug it into my windows box, it shows up in device manager (with no readable partition of course). To test, I formatted it NTFS and was able to copy data to it. So the disk is fine.

I plug it back into my enclosure and spins up, but never detected. Any Ideas?

Thanks for any help!

Does the DL180 have the latest BIOS/firmware update?

 

[TFS_Rein]

Does the DL180 have the latest BIOS/firmware update?

Yes, When I bought it back in december I updated to the latest version (which was a year old already, so I don't see them updating the server anymore but I can check when I get home tonight.)

It's just strange because I have a slightly newer 3TB WD drive of the same make (Green) and it has been in my array for the past two weeks, so I don't see how it could be a compatibility issue.

Just something with this drive in particular maybe?

Here is something I forgot to put in my original post. When I first put the drive into the sleds and loaded it into the server, it did not spin up at all. I checked, and a metal part of the sled was touching the circuit board of the HDD. I bent it out a bit and then the drive spun up, but still not detected. I did my testing of the drive in Windows AFTER I bent the metal outward, so the drive shows up and works AFTER being shorted out like that. So I don't think it's relevant but wanted to mention it.

 

[Z300M]

If you connect a different drive to the same SATA port in the server, is it recognized? Maybe the drive survived the contact between the circuit board and the sled but the SATA port didn't.

 

[TFS_Rein]

If you connect a different drive to the same SATA port in the server, is it recognized? Maybe the drive survived the contact between the circuit board and the sled but the SATA port didn't.

I think I found out what the issue was.

I have dual 460W power supplies for this server. They were set to high efficiency mode which loads one power supply and keeps one offline. I was thinking with everything I have on this server it may have been too much for one PS to handle. I switched it to balanced, which does a 50/50 split between them, and it's working fine now! I might have to upgrade to some 750w power supplies in the near future.

just for reference I have 2 L5630 CPU's, 12x4GB of RAM, 10x3TB HDD's, 1x512 SSD, 1x320HDD. Guess I was pushing it with 460w :-\

Thanks for the help everyone

 

[cyberjock]

No, that sounds like something else. I have more than twice as many hard drives as you and I don't even hit 350w at full load.

 

[jgreco]

I disagree with cyberjock. It is certainly well within the realm of possibility. Can you check your power draw? Either with IPMI or with a meter?

 

[cyberjock]

I wasn't saying that he was wrong. Just that I don't think it's particularly likely. There's more things that I think are more likely than what he's assuming.

 

[jgreco]

It's by far the easiest to check, though, assuming the machine has load monitoring on its power supply. I can't remember if the 180's do; the 380's definitely do though. It would be a perfect fit to the described symptoms. If it's pulling more than 350-400 watts steady state, it is struggling to spin the extra platter with the single supply.

 

[TFS_Rein]

Well I think I am still having issues, because various disks will still not show up properly. I'll plug them in and just get Camcontrol bus resets, with the drives never populating.

I do have freenas virtualized with VMware and Proper HBA passthrough, but I'll boot it on bare metal and see if anything changes.

Last time I had the server hooked up to my kill a watt, it would read between 150w and 180 depending on load. This was back with 6x2TB, two 256 SSD's and two L5520's. This of course was measured after the system booted, not during POST when all fans are spinning at max speed, hard drives spinning up, etc. I'll try to get a measurement tonight to see what it's pulling now.

It is also possible that one of the power supplies is going bad (or the PS distribution node) and can't handle even close to it's rated load now.

 

[jgreco]

Uhhhhh, HP? Virtualized FreeNAS? There's a bunch of slightly confusing and contradictory information out there about HP having a broken VT-d implementation and ESXi not supporting it. You might want to Google "hp esxi vt-d" and oh by the way you've probably shot yourself in the foot a bit by failing to mention up-front what is essentially a key fact - that you've virtualized FreeNAS.

There's a sticky by somebody somewhere that describes why you shouldn't.