Supermicro CSE-216 Backplane issue?

[thejimmahknows]

Hello Folks,

First post here in a long time, and am hoping y'all can help me figure this one out. I recently purchased a Supermicro CSE-216 and X8DTU-F motherboard/chassis on eBay(https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-CSE-216-24-Bay-2U-Server-Chassis-w-X8DTU-F-Dual-LGA1366-Motherboard-/372161723547?) and started loading it up with RAM and CPUs. The issue I am running into is the RAID volume I create keeps losing 3-4 drives after a couple of hours. I have 8x 5TB Segate(https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barracuda-2-5-Inch-Internal-ST5000LM000/dp/B01M0AADIX). The HDD failures seem random. For example on the first failure, drives 1,3,6 disappeared. The next failure was drives 2,3,5. The randomness doesn't point me in the direction that there is something wrong with the HDDs.
I've tried several RAID cards so far to create a Volume out of the 8x5Tb drives:

• Adaptec 76105, tried RAID6
• Adaptec 72405, tried RAID6
• LSI 9211-8i, tried RAID10(no RAID 6 supported by this card), This one lasted almost 12 hours until 3 drives disappeared.
• Going to try LSI 9260-16i in RAID6 next....

So to add even more complexity to this, I have a LSI 9211-8i who is handling drive bay 0-3. I am running my OS off this LSI and running ESX 6.0 Server with 4x15k 146Gb drives in RAID10. This has yet to fail.

Right now, my thoughts point to a bad backplane model, BPN-SAS-216A. But I am unsure how to prove it or rule it out.

I appreciate everyones time looking at my post. Thanks in advance.

 

[mwroobel]

While it is mostly a backplane issue (could be power regulation problems) when the drives are dropping out are they happening one at a time or all at once? What OS is running on top of Esxi handling the 5TB drives in question? If they are dropping one at a time, you might have to see if they support ERC which I do not believe the 2.5” Barracudas support which could explain this in theory but not usually this many at once. The best quick test would be install another backplane and see if the problem resolves.

 

[thejimmahknows]

While it is mostly a backplane issue (could be power regulation problems) when the drives are dropping out are they happening one at a time or all at once? What OS is running on top of Esxi handling the 5TB drives in question? If they are dropping one at a time, you might have to see if they support ERC which I do not believe the 2.5” Barracudas support which could explain this in theory but not usually this many at once. The best quick test would be install another backplane and see if the problem resolves.

Hello mwroobel,

The amount of drives disappearing varies, but from what I can tell. If I use either Adaptec, 1-2 drives disappear. The LSI, at least 4 disappear between channels.

I have a thread opened over at servethehome.com and someone said it is because these drives require special adapters because they use PMR and SMR? I'm not sure about this...?

Another thing I haven't tried is converting one of the LSI to IT firmware and just doing a passthrough to a VM running something like FreeNAS to do software raid or something. Not sure if its worth it...