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PostPosted: Sun Dec 25, 2011 11:57 pm 
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The missus hooked me up with a new Rosewill RSV-S4-X enclosure for Christmas, and I was eager to give it a test drive. I have 3 old WDC 250 GB SATA drives laying around (going to wait for prices to come down on 3 TB drives), so I put those in there, connected it to my EX490 and fired it up. After a couple minutes, all of the drives showed up in Device Manager, and so I went into the Console to configure them.

This is where I started noticing problems. The Console didn't want to start, so I'd kill it and retry, at which point I was warned that Twonky was having a problem, so I chose to skip Twonky. I also noticed the server would freeze up (I was doing all this via the console using the debug cable). The mouse would freeze too, and would remain frozen for about 5 seconds at a time. This would happen about once per minute.

I was also noticing the 5 lights on the RSV would go out and then come back on one by one (power, host and drive lights 2, 3 and 4 are lit; drive bay 1 is empty so that light is out).

The System event log had plenty to say, including "The device, \Device\Scsi\Si35311, did not respond within the timeout period" and "The device, \Device\Harddisk6, is not ready for access yet."

I tried rebooting, which seemed to help, but then I realized that the server "dropped" all of the drives and the controller showed no devices connected.

I poked around here and see that this seems to be a pretty common problem, and a solution that worked for many is to try replacing the eSATA cable. A couple years ago I bought an off-brand eSATA enclosure at a computer show (glorified swap meet). The enclosure kicked the bucket in less than a year, but it only cost me $15 so I wasn't too worried about it. I kept the cable, though, and used it with a different enclosure. Being the only red colored eSATA cable I have, I decided to use it on the RSV. I shut everything down, swapped out the black cable that came with the RSV and installed the red cable that came with the "el cheapo" eSATA enclosure and fired everything up.

All of the errors are gone. I cleared the system event log, and I've not gotten a single error off the SiI 3531 controller since. I was actually able to add the disks to the pool. The freeze-ups, not ready for access errors, etc. have not returned. OK, so it's only been 30 minutes with the red cable in place, but with the black cable in place, problems were the only thing I could count on.

This seems to affect Rosewill and Sans Digital folks alike, and the cable replacement seems to solve the problems for many, and I'm cautiously optimistic that's the case here too.

Are Rosewill and Sans Digital just putting out a bunch of junky, crappy cables that don't work? I'm hard-pressed to believe that an eSATA cable I got at a swap meet is actually a better cable, although in the 2+ years I've used it I never had a lick of trouble with it. I put the RSV cable (made by CFI) on a different external HDD on a laptop and am going to see how it behaves.

What experiences have others had on this?

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PostPosted: Mon Dec 26, 2011 11:32 am 
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msawyer91 wrote:
The System event log had plenty to say, including "The device, \Device\Scsi\Si35311, did not respond within the timeout period" and "The device, \Device\Harddisk6, is not ready for access yet."
While my experience is limited to the EX47x series chassis, these are the kinds of errors I was bumping into with suspect drives in my esata enclosure(s). That said, I also tried a few different cables and had success with a good looking shielded cable from ebay and by moving my suspect drives into the main server bays.

That aside, Server startup was delayed significantly by adding the esata enclosure.

Good Luck tracking down your gremlins!


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PostPosted: Thu Jan 05, 2012 7:59 am 
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It is true that the drives could've caused the problems. However, these were all working drives--I had a bunch of 250 GB drives laying around. I tested each one, and HD Sentinel gave each a clean bill of health on a test machine. And so I was led to believe it was the cable.

One thing I did find interesting with the RSV was that it was dead on arrival. It would not power on at all, not even with a different power cord. When I opened the case to have a peek, I noticed that a cable on the PSU was partially unplugged! This clearly was not a shipping accident, as it was a snug plug and it was a tight fit for my fingers to reach it. Once I fixed that, it fired right up, but I digress...

And so my "el cheapo" red cable has been working flawlessly for well over a week, and I just popped a fourth 250 GB drive into the case. Once 3 TB drives come back down in price (prices seem to be creeping downward :)) to close-to-pre-flood levels, I'll replace all four drives, at which point I'll upgrade the server to WHS 2011.

The cable that came with the RSV, on the other hand, was producing problems on my work laptop. Each time I tried to use the laptop with the eSATA drive attached, I noticed the drive light on the laptop flickering in a rhythmic pattern. The UI would lock up for 30-60 seconds at a time, then become responsive for about 15-30 seconds, and then lock up again. The screen would flash and I'd get an announcement that the display driver stopped responding but successfully recovered. The system event log showed tons of errors on the iaStor driver that the drive (the system disk) did not respond within the timeout period, and also that a reset to the controller was issued.

As soon as I'd unplug the eSATA disk, the problems disappeared. Plug it back in, and nothing but trouble.

My wife was near a Best Buy yesterday so I asked her if she could pick up an eSATA cable if they had one for a reasonable price. She found a Dynex one for $20, so I said let's give it a try. It rang up for $1.99 clearance! I hooked it up, and no trouble at all. So I'm closing this case as a bad cable. :)

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PostPosted: Thu Jan 05, 2012 3:30 pm 
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Glad to here you resolved you problem with a simple cable issue.
But I am confused on your opening statement.
going to wait for prices to come down on 3 TB drives
I thought the ex49X series with whs v1 did not support over 2tb?

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PostPosted: Sun Jan 08, 2012 10:25 pm 
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Ruben, you are correct about the drive size. However, rebuilding my EX490 to WHS 2011 is on my to-do list for 2012. Ideally I'd like to buy all 4 drives at one time and then just do the rebuild in one shot, rather than buying a drive here and there, and piecing it together.

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PostPosted: Mon Jan 09, 2012 1:35 pm 
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Both the Sans Ditgal and Rosewill enclosures are manufactured by CFI in Taiwan. I have 4 of the 4 bay units, 1 of the 5 bay units and I used the same backplace used in the 4 bay units to convert 2 EX470 encosured to become port multipilers so all told I actually 7 units.

I experienced drop outs starting in March 2011 I believe and it seems to occur with heavy disk activity. This occured shortly after Perfect Disk released I believe it was v12 but I removed that software and things quieted down but still occured randomly. I did the cable swap, controller swap in the ProLiant and even changed out the drives but things only really quieted down when I uninstalled the software. I performed a full backup of the server at the time with no issues using one of these Port Multipliers to host the backup. I decided to perform a Factory Recovery and then restore the Client Backup Database using BDBB and then migrate the data back to the server. At this time I did experience drop outs so I came to the conclusion that the drop outs occur during heavy drive activity and possibly also irritated by DE but this is just my opinion. Since July 2011 I have only experienced 1 drop out which may be more drive related than anything else. A simple reboot of the server and a recycling of the power to the specific port multiplier took care of the issue and that was last month.

I am about to transfer quite abit of movie rips to the ProLiant this week and I will do it in small chunks then increase the amount of data to see if I am correct in the drive activity causing the drop out issue and I will also pay close attention to see if its a particular drive or enclosure.

For the most part since July 2011 I have had very few issues with the ProLiant which I keep online because it continues to provide me the redundancy for my files for online access until I come to terms with a DE or RAID Solution for Highlander. I know this much and that is I currently have 13 drives in Highlander and have room to install another 9 drives before expanding outside the box but until I come to terms with a redundancy solution for Highlander my ProLiant will continue to run.

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