JBOD Storage Issues - Enclosure or HDD? Help!

[Nutdotnet]

Howdy -

I have a Mediasonic ProRaid 4-Bay Hard Drive Enclosure (HFR2-SU3S2FW) running in JBOD mode hooked up via FW to a 2012 Mac Mini. It's ran great for over a year with no issues. I have 3 HDDs in the unit. All Seagates with 1-3TB and 2-2TB drives. These are partition into 4 volumes.

About 3-4 days ago the volumes started disconnecting randomly. Further investigation revealed that the enclosure was actually shutting off on its own. This first led me to believe that it's an enclosure issue.

In reviewing "Console" on the Mac, I also noticed that I was getting I/O errors, randomly, on 3 of the 4 partitions (ex: kernel: disk2s4: I/O Error). All 3 of these partitions all have data on one of the hard drives in the JBOD. This made me think that it might be a hard drive failing.

Unfortunately, the enclosure will not stay on long enough for me to much testing. There are no error lights that come up on the enclosure itself.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I might be able to test if it's the enclosure or one of the hard drives? Should I put the suspected hard drive in another enclosure?

Just looking for some guidance in order to save me frustrations & a headache (I don't think I'll use JBOD again).

 

[Nutdotnet]

Does anyone see any issue with putting the suspect bad drive in a different external enclosure in order to test it?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

No, that should be fine.

A bad enclosure can absolutely cause I/O errors. It doesn't really have anything to do with JBOD vs. RAID mode.

 

[phis6]

Probably the enclosure has problems and might also would possibly cause your hard drives to get damaged if you keep using it.

 

[RU482]

power issues on the JBOD perhaps?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

power issues on the JBOD perhaps?

Power is one thing -- that could be likely.

What sort of interface with your computer? Is it an eSATA? USB2 or 3? Ethernet?

 

[Nutdotnet]

Thanks guys. I have a new enclosure being delivered today.

phis6 - I think you also hit the nail on the head. I have a feeling I may have goofed one of the HDDs up due to me trying to investigate the problem. Luckily that particular drive didn't have anything worth saving.

BonzaiDuck - Firewire. I tried the USB interface as well with no changes.

 

[Nutdotnet]

So, riddle me this -

I don't know why I didn't try this before, but I tried booting into windows and the raid setup works fine. Works great actually.

So I'm busy copying *stuff* to various other hard drives. After that, I'm not sure what to do. I'm still not really able to tell if a drive is going bad or not. In OSX the enclosure essentially locks up the OS. I did also boot into recovery and ran Disk Utility from there. Three volumes had repair issues. Two of the three couldn't be repaired.

But again - it works fine in Windows. These are HFS+ formatted.

Any ideas? On one hand, I'm happy that I can get my important documents. On the other, I still want to use the enclosure....but don't want to go through this again.

 

[Nutdotnet]

For those that may be interested:

It turned out to be a bad drive. Once I got into windows I was able to use s/w that was able to read the hardware raid controller. The same drive that was giving an I/O error gave errors in windows.

I haven't lost too much stuff, nothing important anyway.

Now to figure out an inexpensive backup solution for my media (if I had to do it over again I would have gone with a raid setup like unRaid vs. a raid enclosure).