New HDD Replacing slot of old HDD

[Aydrian]

Hello everybody,

sorry for the double posting but i'm a little bit desperate as i don't see the solution to my problem. 

I put together a xpenology server and i was proud of it until i tried to add a new 10TB Western Digital HDD. What happended after i put the drive in the system was that it take the spot of a 4TB disk in position 12 making the SHR volume corrupted. I then removed the 10TB HDD and luckly the old 4TB drive came back and i was able to rebuild the volume.

The question is why the system didn't use a free slot but a spot that was already taken?

I have one ssd connected directly to the motherboard (slot 3 in the picture below). All the other 6 drives where connected to a SAS controller. When i added the 7th hdd, the controller had all 7 hdd, but when xpenology started only 6 hdd were visible.

I looked around for a solution, and the only thing that was close enough to a solution was this thing of enabling more disks, but it shouldn't be my case as i only have 8 HDD mounted (including the 10TB new HDD) which is below the 12 disk limit. Also between the SAS controller and the motherboard the maximum number of HDD i can mount is 12 (8 from the SAS controller and 4 from the motherboard)

 

It is sad as i don't want to make other test as i am afraid to lose everything and forced to reinstall xpenology from scratch. I already made a backup of the important stuff but if i do the problem can come back when i want to add another HDD.

 

BTW the plan for this HDD was to change the volume from SHR to SHR2 to have 2 disks redundancy.

 

Again sorry for the double post.

Thank you

Aydrian

[PhoenixNL72]

Pretty sure the problem is that the drive number is limited to 12 per default. That combined with the fact that there are skipped sata ports from your motherboard integrated SATA controller (which is the reason the ports for the SAS controller start from disk7) imho makes it so DSM doesn't properly detect drives connected to the remaining SAS ports. I think the solution would be to enlarge the number of drives usable to 14.
You can change the "maxdisks" value in /etc.defaults/synoinfo.conf and /etc/synoinfo.conf
I think it's It's very likely that will solve your problem.

 

Alternatively if you are using Jun's Bootloader 1.2b you can change the grub.c to properly make DSM aware of the number of ports per controller.
Locate the line with "set sata_args". It should look something like this:
set sata_args='sata_uid=1 sata_pcislot=5 synoboot_satadom=1 DiskIdxMap=0C SataPortMap=1 SasIdxMap=0'

 

If your onboard SATA port has only 2 ports (and the SAS controller has 8 then change SataPortMap=1 to  SataPortMap=28 might do the trick to remove the 4 disk gap between the samsung SSD (DIsco 3) and the WD 2TB (Disco 7)
(SataPortMap = 28 means 2 sata ports located on the first sata controller, 8 on the second.)
If your motherboard has 4 sata ports, set SataPortMap = 48. If your motherboard has 6 you can still use SataPortMap=48 this should just mean that DSM will skip onboard sata port 5 &  6 (and those should therefore never be used to connect a harddisk !)

(Check also for more detailed info on sata_args

)

Edited April 14, 2020 by PhoenixNL72

[flyride]

You don't need more drive slots, you need to correctly configure and test your SataPortMap/DiskIdxMap for your controllers so that all active ports map to active slots.

[Aydrian]

You guys are right, i didn't notice the motherboard had 6 sata port. so basically what is going on is that the first 6 sata port of the motherboard allocated plus 6 of the sas port. as soon as i added another drive to the sas controller probably the system didn't have space for the new drive and used another drive spot. 

 

In any event i'm very happy with the system, i also have a 10gigabit network card and a 10gigabit network switch and i created iscsi drives for all my pc + i added a read only ssd cache. everything is flawless, it is like having an huge ssd on each pc. 

 

The only thing i'm worried is if the sdcard break. Not sure how to backup it from time to time.

[IG-88]

58 minutes ago, Aydrian said:

The only thing i'm worried is if the sdcard break. Not sure how to backup it from time to time.

 

use Win32DiskImager 1.0 and activate "read only allocated partitions"

(you presumably used it already to write the image, you can use it to read to a image file too)

 

you would only need to backup after dsm updates