5$ for an answer!!! Please help! (Norco 24TB content inside)

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MaloventEvil

n00b
Joined
Mar 31, 2010
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Hello all,

I have been trying to upgrade my media PC to add a 16x1.5TB Seagates. I added in the drives to my Norco 4020, and plugged them into a Highpoint 3540 raid card... The computer would not post -- the bios would start to post and then it would just reboot before i could get to setup or anything. If i pulled the drives from the hot-swap trays, it would post!

After swapping literally every component on the computer (mobo, ram, cpu, raid card for an Adaptec one, power supply for a 1200w one) the same thing happened (would not post). I then pulled the drives from the hot swap bays and plugged them DIRECTLY into the raid card via a mini-sas -> 4x sas cable and it posted just fine!!

I thought this was a backplane issue, so I tried new Backplanes and a 4220 and the exact same problem persisted!

Has anyone ever heard of this? Any ideas?

If your idea fixes the problem, I will paypal you $5.

Thanks,
-mEvil

extra info:

orig specs:
- intel q6600 cpu
- GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
- 8GB ddr2 ram
- 1000w mushkin power supply
- 9x1TB WD
- 16x1.5TB seagates

- tried swapping the motherboard for another q6600 motherboard (can't remember name), tried swapping power supply & ram

then tried getting a new mobo/cpu/ram per highpoint's recommendations

- i7 860
- asus p55 deluxe
- 8GB ddr3 ram

same issues persist.
 
Sounds like its definitely a power supply issue. Those drives can eat a ton of power if they spin up all at once during boots.

I saw that muskin PSU has 6 - 12V rails at 19 amps each. I would try and balance all the rails with the power connectors for the case becase trying to run them all on 2 rails can easily crash it at boot.

Or try one of these with fewer rails:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817814010
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153119
 
I tried swapping the power supply with that exact model 1200w thermaltake.

It is also odd that no one on here seems to complain about any backplane issues! I have tried both the sata backplanes on the 4020 and the sas backplanes on the 4220.
 
theinv said:
Well, are you booting the OS from highpoint?
Click to expand...

No, I am booting the OS from an os drive plugged in directly to the motherboard. It doesn't even get past posting though, let alone to the boot portion (like I can't even get to the bios setup -- it just reboots before I can. If I pull some of the hotswap drives out between the reboots so that there are 8 drives plugged into the raid card instead of 16, it boots as normal).
 
Take the RAID card out. Plug a bunch of drives into the SATA ports and see what happens.

It might be that the RAID card is not playing nice.
 
Also you said when you only do some of the drives it works.

Makes me think

  1. Your RAID card is acting up on a certain port.
  2. You have a bad drive that is causing this.

So I would start with one drive, and just add each drive one by one until it fails.
Then pull that drive and continue.

If its just one drive, then good, but if it persists at a given point 8, 10, 11 drives then we know there is something wrong with RAID card, cable or Backplane.
 
I would agree with nitrobass24, would think there is a defective drive somewhere.
Try them all one at a time.
 
How about trying with just a few drives in the norco (2-4 drives)?

I am with those suspecting PSU issues at play here.
Also check that nothing is shorting somewhere.
 
spectrumbx said:
How about trying with just a few drives in the norco (2-4 drives)?

I am with those suspecting PSU issues at play here.
Also check that nothing is shorting somewhere.
Click to expand...

Well it doesnt take that much power to do 16 drives.
Plus the fact that he has tried two PSUs.

Something could be shorting out, but im fairly certain its not a PSU issue
 
Might be related to APM features of the drives. Did you enable anything relating to advanced power management in the RAID card BIOS or are any drive jumpers set for staggered spinup or power management?

Does it seem like the drives get scanned by the RAID card BIOS and some of the HDD LEDs come on but nothing happens for a really long time, the RAID card BIOS times out and the computer reboots just to continue where it left before the reboot?

If that's the case, see if you can disable any staggered spinup settings or set any power management features to disabled or at least extend the timers in the RAID card BIOS!

Had (or I should say I sort of still have) similar issues with 48 x 2TB drives during boot-up on an Areca ARC-1680i RAID controller with two HP SAS expander cards. I have 4 x 600W redundant power supplies, so it's not an issue with power in my system. It's just a matter of getting the right combination of settings figured out! I know which settings work on my system, I'm just experimenting with different settings to figure out what the best power/performance combination is. So during my experimentation, I came across the same symptoms you are stuck with....
 
nitrobass24 said:
Well it doesnt take that much power to do 16 drives.
Plus the fact that he has tried two PSUs.

Something could be shorting out, but im fairly certain its not a PSU issue
Click to expand...

I have counted 25 drives (16 + 9).
Drives can suck a lot of juice during power up.

Now a 1200w PSU should be able to handle that, but as staticlag stated, make sure to check that the load is properly spread across the rails.
 
Well it seems that you have ruled out the PSU as you plugged the drives directly into the card (i am guessing all of them) and it booted

something that people forget is that HDDs use 5V as well as 12V and a lot of big PSUs still only have a small amount of 5V

looking at all the other things you have done it seems to point to the back plains

it might be a back plain power issue rather than a PSU power issue

i would try and use 2 PSUs just as a test each powering half the back plains
 
Are you running a high-end graphics card on the board also?

So you did hook all 24 drives up (w/ power) to the card/MB and it boots up ok without being in the bays?
 
I did not know that the drives use 2.8amp each on spinup! I checked and saw that when inside the case we were using two 12v rails that provide 18amp max, but when outside, we were using 4 (2 of which providing 30amp max). I suspect that is the problem, and ordered some male sata power -> female molex adapters -- hopefully that solves it!

thanks for the brainstorming guys! will keep this thread updated with new details!
 
This is why I only buy Single Rail PSUs

Dont have to worry about crap like that.
 
Typically that number of drives will easily use 700-1000w of power during boot for the first minute or so. :)

I'd be curious to see what they idle at 200w perhaps?
 
staticlag said:
Typically that number of drives will easily use 700-1000w of power during boot for the first minute or so. :)

I'd be curious to see what they idle at 200w perhaps?
Click to expand...

umm no.

You are saying that each drive is pulling 70w, that is absurd.
 
MaloventEvil said:
I did not know that the drives use 2.8amp each on spinup! I checked and saw that when inside the case we were using two 12v rails that provide 18amp max, but when outside, we were using 4 (2 of which providing 30amp max). I suspect that is the problem, and ordered some male sata power -> female molex adapters -- hopefully that solves it!

thanks for the brainstorming guys! will keep this thread updated with new details!
Click to expand...

Where did u get that info?

Each drive using 2.8amp on spinup is not possible. Most househould's circuit can only handle 15amps. If it is 2.8amps, then u can not have more than 10 drives in a system.
 
They dont use 2.8a on startup, but that is max current that the Seagate will take before its fried. You pump more than 2.8a into that drive and it will be dead.

EDIT: Would also like to point out that its 2.8a @ 12v....not 120v so you cant compare it to 15a circuit in your house.
Now if these drives used 120v then we would bigger issues :)
 
MaloventEvil said:
I did not know that the drives use 2.8amp each on spinup! I checked and saw that when inside the case we were using two 12v rails that provide 18amp max, but when outside, we were using 4 (2 of which providing 30amp max). I suspect that is the problem, and ordered some male sata power -> female molex adapters -- hopefully that solves it!

thanks for the brainstorming guys! will keep this thread updated with new details!
Click to expand...

People grossly under estimate how much power drives use up during spin up... up to 30 watts each (or 2.5 amps).
Normal power usage is much lower, but spin up power usage can be quite high.
Most newer quality PSUs will combine the rails, but not all.
 
2.8A for a few seconds wouldn't be far fetched to get the motor going. After a few seconds, the motor only has to maintain the rotation of the platters and therefore requires far less energy. In fact, depending on how the drive and it's power input is structured, the capacitors on the control board can draw a couple of hundred amps for a few milliseconds! That's why properly designed back planes are required that pre-charge the 12V and 5V rails (usually through a resistor at a few ohms) to make them hot-swappable! There are a few pins on the SATA power connector that are dedicated for that task. This will prevent damaging the pins of connectors as well as possible data corruption due to voltage sags and/or spikes on the supply rails. It is therefore NOT a good idea to hot-plug a drive onto a SATA (cable) power connector!
 
in the psu's defense (it is a zalman 1000w) it has 960w dedicated to the 12v rails (which it has 6 of). :) hopefully this fixes it! the math is sound though!
 
i might make it onto the top 10 list on this site! It has:

16x 1.5Tb drives, and 6x 1Tb drives inside the case, and another 5x 1Tb drives outside of it :)
 
To correct myself, well maybe not a whole 60 sec of that draw (700-1000w) but for 10 sec I can see it using that much.
 
theinv said:
Where did u get that info?

Each drive using 2.8amp on spinup is not possible. Most househould's circuit can only handle 15amps. If it is 2.8amps, then u can not have more than 10 drives in a system.
Click to expand...

:) as said before in the thread -- 2.8amp @ 12v is not the same as 2.8amp @ 120v :)
 
MaloventEvil said:
yeah -- i wish the drives i got supported staggered spinup. lesson learned!
Click to expand...

Drives dont need it, your RAID card just has to support it.....which yours does. ;)

Boot the system with some of the drives, and enter the RAID BIOS and you should be able to set it up.
 
Your drives need to support staggered spin-up as well, otherwise, as soon as power is applied to the drive, it will spin-up!

My 50 drive server draws up to 1100W during power-up and depending on the drive configuration setup can be anywhere between 350W to 750W (measured with a Kill-A-Watt type meter).

Now until I had all of the drives firmware updated to support APM mode, they didn't react to the RAID controllers spin-up commands. So even though the RAID controller was configured to send the proper commands to spin-up the drives (tried 0.7s, 1s, 3s, 6s, etc), they always powered up as soon as the power supply was turned on.
 
I think I read somewhere that in that Norco case you are using the backplane rails are split into two, between the right and left molex banks, so you would have to put two or three independent rails on the right and left equally.
 
staticlag said:
I think I read somewhere that in that Norco case you are using the backplane rails are split into two, between the right and left molex banks, so you would have to put two or three independent rails on the right and left equally.
Click to expand...

You only need to use one of the molex connectors on the Norco.
 
For some reason this doesn't seem power related, 1200watt PSU for 24 drives or whatever? I've got a 550watt psu for 18 drives, 2 quadcore cpus, dencently powered gpu... I have no problem with power. I'm doubting the extra 6 drives need over 100watts each. Also BTW, if it was power, and he turned it on and no post, he could then just hit reset button and it would likely then post, since the drives woudl then be spun up and idling. I'm sure 1200watts is enough for 24 idling hdds.

Obviously the best thing to do is put the drives in the backplanes but don't connect the backplanes to the controller. That'll rule out power. You and then just start in the backplanes one at a time.

If you can only connect so many drives to the controller before you can no longer boot, probably a bug in HBA or maybe in motherboard BIOS-- I think bug in motherboard BIOS would be more interesting.
 
1200w for 24 drives is a bit overkill. I have a 610w PC P&C in my file server with 21 drives and a 400w Corsair in my drive array (20 drives and a SAS expander).
 
Unfortunately not all PSUs are created equal, all those PSUs you mentioned were single high amp rail construction.
 
staticlag said:
To correct myself, well maybe not a whole 60 sec of that draw (700-1000w) but for 10 sec I can see it using that much.
Click to expand...

Only way it would draw that much if all drives spun up at once and it would likely only be for a second or two (not 2 seonds). With a 0.4 second spinup time on my 20 drive system I never get over 600 watts and my system is very beefy (lots of things using a lot of extra power). It uses maybe 450 watts when the disks are under full load or booting.
 
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