I've got a WHS 2011 based server with 4x750Gb drives in the single enclosure. The plan is to replace them over time with drives of much greater capacity, but for now the space is fine. However, I have suspicions that one of them is failing. It's been making a ticking noise when busy for some time now and every now and then it disappears from view. The data on this drive isn't particularly vital, but what really aggravates is that when this drive goes it takes another one down with it which IS vital. A reboot solves it, of course, but this has begun happening a lot more often since I began serious streaming from that other drive. I think (from the system builder) that somehow these two drives are sharing the same port(?) on the motherboard. What I'd like to do is disable the suspect drive for a while to see if it stabilizes the system. If I don't lose the other drive for a week or two of regular use I'll feel confident about retiring the suspect disk and replacing it. Any advice much appreciated.

PS I've used a couple of 'health' monitoring tools on the drives and none of them have indicated this drive has an issue. This surprises me, but maybe it shouldn't.

Hi mrpleasant Welcome to the forums!

I know there is nothing more frustrating then to have one or more drives just drop out of site. The first impression is to blame the actual drive but sometimes its not the drive but other hardware issues which are often overlooked from the simple such as faulty cables or connections, PSU issues and even issues with the controller or controller settings. This is not to say the drive is not the issue but there are other things which can and do cause issues and these issues tend to show up most when there is heavy drive activity.

What is unclear here is how your server is configured and if your using the SATA ports on the actual motherboard or if your server has a backplane to connect the drives and if so how that is setup or if you have a dedicated controller card. Since there are a multitude of factors that can come into play it always regardless of the setup comes down to a process of ellimination.

If you want to simply disable or remove the drive from the server you can do that simply by moving the it contains to another drive and then just remove or disconnect the drive from the server to take it out of the picture or replace the drive with another to see if the issue goes away or reappears. I have personally been down this road before and the primary difference is in hard drive population.

I can tell you that in the past I have had to actually change out a drive controller in this case it was one of the three MV8's I was using. I also encountered issues with another controller where drives would drop out and the solution was with a BIOS Setting in the PnP/PCI Configuration Settings where I had to change the PCI EXPRESS Relative Items Payload Size to 128 or 256. This pretty much resolved the issues I was experiencing in that particular server.

Since I know how frustrating this can be I certainly hope you find the cause and are able to resolve it so you can move forward with your server. What I do know is that once you go through this exercise of figuring out a solution that it will better prepare you for the issues you may encounter down the road which doesn't lessen the impact of the current issue but I assure you it will help you in the future. If weird things have happend I can honestly tell I have probably already worked around and through it and with each isssue I tackle it has always better prepared me for the issues that arise although hair loss and addiction to Advil are he by products.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Much obliged for the answer! I 'lost' my original post somehow, clearly looking in the wrong part of the forum. Anyway, the server has been behaving iself lately, but I'll keep all your possible causes and solutions in mind for next time. I take your point that the problem could be any number of things, many of them far more technical than I'd like, but one of my motives for going down the server route rather than just tacking on a NAS drive was to learn. I guess this represents an opportunity. (Gulp...)