It all started with a howto blog about setting up a home file server using the newly released Solaris ZFS. I placed an order with Newegg for all the parts necessary; four Western Digital 750 gig SATA hard drives along with a motherboard, AMD 64 bit processor, 8 gigs of RAM and whatever else needed for this redundant, resilient and robust back up system.
After spending a few hours assembling all of the pieces, Note that the hard drives did not come with SATA cables and the motherboard was OEM so it did not come with any. This was a big pain in the ass since I had to strip ones from other machines.
Finally the moment all DIY computerist wait for, the boot screen. The BIOS recognized 3 out of the 4 hard drives. There could be several reasons for this. Faulty SATA cable, faulty SATA connector on the MB, bad hard drive, bad power connector, etc. I then powered down and checked all connections and cables. Powered it back up and now I saw all 4 drives. I then installed OpenSolaris and started configuring it. Then OpenSolaris only showed 3 drives. I thought it was a connection again so I swapped the cable and MB connects of the drive not being recognized and powered up again. The drive still did not show a sign of life in the BIOS. The SATA connection and cable worked on another drive without problems so it was safe to eliminate that. I tried this a few more times with intermittent results. Sometimes the drive was there sometimes not.
I requested an RMA from Newegg and sent the drive back for another one, $10 and 10 days later I received another drive. The box was banged up but this is not surprising since I have seen the UPS guy toss packages from the sidewalk up a flight of stairs to the neighbors front porch. This could definitely do some damage to a hard drive, although these things most likely come from China and have had a long trip and have been jostled long before this. Still, it doesn’t help when I am trying to diagnose bad hard drive issues on a “New” hard drive.
Well this drive was recognized by the BIOS but now OpenSolaris could not access it or write/read to it. I then booted up with SpinRite to test the drive, which responded:
“Empty Drive” and “Unable to access the entire range of sectors occupied by this region of the drive”.
I have never seen this error but it appeared to be a terminal one. Newegg was as always very good about returns and even paid for shipping this time. I’ve yet to get another one but can’t help to think if UPS wasn’t to blame? I have never had a problem with a new Western Digital hard drive but it’s still a mystery.
On a closing note, OpenSolaris was a huge disappointment, I am too used to Linux tools and features and sad Solaris doesn’t offer some of them. On the other hand FreeNAS was an easier option but that left me dealing with RAID and there are also issues with that.
