Please explain strange behavior...

[Jonathan]

Ok, from the beginning...

I have an X6. I have 4 (300GB) hard drives. One of these 4 disks has all my data on it. I put the three other blank disks into the X6. Very poor performance existed mainly due to bad sectors on the third disk. I RMA'ed the third disk.

I started over. I placed the two remaining good disk into the X6 and did a factory reset. The X6 booted up and worked fine in RAID1. I did not change any settings at all except for establishing a static IP connection on my LAN with my smoothwall.org firewall and the MAC address of the X6. I received in the mail a brand new 300GB disk I purchased. I placed this new (identical model 300GB) disk into slot 3 of the X6. Booted up.

Problems begin to occur.

Upon the next boot up of the X6, a disk scan was performed on the third disk. The X6 stated that I must reboot the X6 after this scan in order to then start the process to expand the volume across all three disks. Scan completed without any errors. I did one setting change prior to the requested reboot. I enabled Jumbo Frames. I rebooted the X6. Upon this next boot up, the expansion did not occur. The X6 showed that the second disk was "dead" and the third was uninitialized but "available."

Now why would this occur? I know for certain that disk 2 is perfectly fine.

I rebooted the X6 again. No change in disk status. I completely shut down the X6 and then started it up again. No change in disk status. I shut down the X6 opened up the X6 case and checked the connections. All connections seemed to be snug and correctly connected. I booted up the X6 and now it shows that disks 2 and 3 are "alive" and being Initialized as suggested by RAID settings ( Initialization 19% complete, Time to finish 2 hr 8 min, Speed 30.0 MB/sec ) message.

Why is the behavior so unpredictable? My emotional response related to this device's "reliability" is poor. How can I expect to feel that my data is safe with this strange unpredictable behavior. I want to use this device as a data archive that I can depend on. Is there any response you can offer that would boost my confidence in this device's reliability?

After the two hour time and the "Initialization" is complete, will I have a three disk configuration and will it be dependable?

[yoh-dah]

Jonathan, after the expansion is complete, please do a Send All Logs with a link to this post so we can take a look to make sure all your disks are good. Typically when a disk is deemed "dead", an I/O request had timed out and resetting the disk and retrying the I/O did not make things better.

I'm not saying this is your case, but one thing to realize is that when you buy disks, especially from some *discounters*, you can end up with gray-level quality, meaning disks that are prone to have more bad sectors, ATA errors, etc. In a typical PC installation, you may not see a problem, but with RAID, each sector is touched during installation, and problems can arise during this step. This is *not* a bad thing, as you would want these problems known in advance before putting your valuable data on it.

[Jonathan]

Initialization finished about 50 min sooner than it stated it would. Then it started resync on disk two, and stated it would finish in about 1 hour. I went to sleep. I'm awake now. Now I'm getting warnings about hard drive temps. And after I restarted the X6 it shows that the second disk is "dead" which is crap.

I sent all logs to support@infrant.com

I've had this thing for 6 days and have had way too many problems.

[Jonathan]

All five of these disks were purchased from NewEgg.com and I've had no trouble at all with them until I got this X6 thing.

[Jonathan]

well, what to do?

shut down x6. took out disk 2 and moved disk 3 from slot 3 and into slot 2, rebooted.

now it says

Initialization 3% complete, Time to finish 2 hr 32 min, Speed 30.0 MB/sec

this thing is a huge time drain... will this thing be setup by next year?

why were the hard drives overheating? They have never done that before?

[yoh-dah]

Initialization finished about 50 min sooner than it stated it would. Then it started resync on disk two, and stated it would finish in about 1 hour. I went to sleep. I'm awake now. Now I'm getting warnings about hard drive temps. And after I restarted the X6 it shows that the second disk is "dead" which is crap.

I sent all logs to support@infrant.com

Did not receive the logs. Please resend.

[yoh-dah]

why were the hard drives overheating? They have never done that before?

You did replace the cover securely, correct? Forced air cooling for the disks won't work otherwise.

[yoh-dah]

why were the hard drives overheating? They have never done that before?

You did replace the cover securely, correct? Forced air cooling for the disks won't work otherwise.

http://www.infrant.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=539

[Jonathan]

cooling returned to normal with top on, counter-intuitive but true. Thanks.

re-input smtp for my ISP, will resend logs.

[yoh-dah]

cooling returned to normal with top on, counter-intuitive but true. Thanks.

re-input smtp for my ISP, will resend logs.

Got your logs. I don't see any trails of a disk failure. Disk 2 seems perfect -- no bad sectors and no errors. Disk 1 has 8 bad sectors mapped, and reports 3840 ATA errors. Disk 1 has been power cycled close to 500 times whereas disk 1 was power cycled only 5. Maybe this is due to disk 2 being newer than disk 1.

Disk 2 overheated and that might explain why it reported dead momentarily. Also, errors on the 1st disk may be due to the overtemp condition as well. Both disks reported overtemp for close to 7 hours. I believe Maxtor normal range goes up to 55C. Your disks reached up to 62C -- not that much over, but I don't know the peculiars of the innards of a Maxtor drive...

[Jonathan]

ok

let me be clear about the chain of events. I've detailed them incorrectly.

4 disks. lets call number 4 the data disk and it has never been inside the x6NAS.

disks 1,2,3 into x6NAS. I've been told disk 1 has bad sectors etc, I sent myself the logs and could see errors to disk 1 and no errors on disk 2, 3.

I pulled disk 1, started rma process.

I moved disk 3 to slot 1, did factory reset. everything worked correctly as raid1.

received new disk in mail. put new disk in slot 3.

booted up expecting raid expansion... got message that disk was being intialized then reboot needed.

after reboot, disk 2 labeled as "dead" now disk 2 was fine before, I saw the log myself... why is it bad now? heat?

x6 shutdown, I removed disk 2 and now have moved disk 3 over to slot 2.

rebooted, x6 successfully booted up, initialized, and resync-ed - can I now consider disks in slots 1 and 2 good disks?

I shutdown the x6 again and put the disk back in that was strangely labeled as "dead" into slot 3... it's being initialized....

Initialization 17% complete, Time to finish 2 hr 11 min, Speed 30.0 MB/sec

I was at this point before and when I re-booted the 2nd disk showed as bad. We'll see if that happens again...

[Jonathan]

I.ve sent logs just docment current status...

[yoh-dah]

I.ve sent logs just docment current status...

The SMART info for disk 3 will not be available until it finishes the initializing/scanning stage. Please resend again after the expansion is complete.

Regarding disk 1, I do notice there were 2 additional bad sectors that were mapped (now 10). And your ATA error count is now 5632 (up from 3840). You may want to keep tabs on the growing number of bad sectors.

[Jonathan]

ATA error count is now 5632 (up from 3840). You may want to keep tabs on the growing number of bad sectors.

Should I just rma all my hard drives? Are the hard drives not good enough for the Infrant but not bad enough to rma?
how bad is too bad?

[Jonathan]

Volume expansion finished without error!
Is it safe to use?

I've sent all logs. Are there any problems? What is the threshold for needing to rma a hard drive for problems?

Please tell me again which log file in the zip archive stores the smart data and a rough idea how to read that smart data?

Thanks for being supportive and patient.

Jonathan