I was just about to move some finished photos to the server and back up some data, when I noticed a penetrating smell. It is also smoky in the house and I’m not quite sure whether just my glasses are not quite clean. Since I was watching Netflix with headphones, I didn’t notice any noise (the server is well insulated anyway, since it’s in the living room). First observation: it’s not coming from outside, so the thunderstorm here didn’t ignite anything in the neighborhood.
After searching all over the house, I unscrew my server. The smell seems to be of electronic origin and there is still a light burning in the refrigerator. Meanwhile, the server also shows me errors on three HDDs, but they are attached to two different SATA controllers. I first thought of a blown capacitor on one of the PCIe SATA cards, but they still look fine (as if I could tell). The server also installed Windows updates during shutdown and since the good piece is equipped with hardware from 2008 (yes an Intel Core2Quad still works sufficiently well) it takes time. Thus, due to lack of patience, the examination of the hardware took place on the running machine. At least, I didn’t notice any further limitations during operation. After everything seemed normal, I unscrewed the other side of the server with the connectors of the HDD and finally found the cause.
An adapter to connect the SATA HDD to the power supply made a spectacular exit. And that just in the week when I read on Heise about SATAn. Well, only that in my case it was the power supply and also only the availability is affected.
After a swap of the adapter, there seems to be no errors at first glance. All eight HDD are recognized, have no SMART errors and the storage pool also seems to be satisfied. A detailed analysis will follow.
What have I learned?
- Do not leave old hardware running unattended.
- Cables belong in the consideration of supply chain security (not only software), even if they are already old.
- One more reason to renew the server with all cables with the release of the Ryzen 7000 in the fall.
- A component costing only a few cents could brick several expensive HDDs. If these three HDDs were damaged, my entire storage pool with parity would be lost.
- I should finish writing the article planned here about my many adventures with my Windows storage pool.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)