Drives disappear few seconds after reboot

[cafebabe]

Bought EON Pi NAS this week.
Built and installed following these instructions around Pi4 with OMV.

FOR_PRINT_EON_INSTRUCTION_MANUAL_20211215.pdf

Had old 150G drive lying around, plugged it in, created filing system, Samba share, tested over network, all working well for 4 days.
Ordered 4 Seagate BarraCuda 1 TB Internal Hard Drive HDD – 2.5 Inch SATA 6 Gb/s 5400, which arrived this morning.
Installed.

Immediately after boot the drives appear in OMV, but within few minutes they disappear.

When I boot I see:

# lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE FSVER LABEL  UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
sda                                                                                 
sdb                                                                                 
sdc                                                                                 
sdd                                                                                 
mmcblk0                                                                             
├─mmcblk0p1 vfat   FAT32 bootfs 9E81-4F92                             203.7M    20% /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 ext4   1.0   rootfs cf2895ca-6dc2-4797-8040-f76ba1508f41   25.4G     6% /

And:

Device         Boot  Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1        8192   532479   524288  256M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2      532480 61069311 60536832 28.9G 83 Linux


Disk /dev/sda: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: SATA            
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/sdb: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: sata            
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/sdc: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: SATA            
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes


Disk /dev/sdd: 931.51 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Disk model: sata            
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

Touch nothing, wait a minute, rerun:

# lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE FSVER LABEL  UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0                                                                             
├─mmcblk0p1 vfat   FAT32 bootfs 9E81-4F92                             203.7M    20% /boot
└─mmcblk0p2 ext4   1.0   rootfs cf2895ca-6dc2-4797-8040-f76ba1508f41   25.4G     6% /

I tried to wipe them when they were visible, the first seemed to wipe OK, they all disappeared while I was wiping the 2nd.

Help please!

[NHHiker]

I would try each drive individually to see if they work. Run:

sudo smartctl -d sat -A /dev/sxx

Where sxx the drive…

With all the drives going I suspect the issue is power. However, drives will go offline if the have utilized all rebuild sectors (unless told to go to read-only mode, if supported).

So we need to determine are the drives good, if so are they pulling to much power. If all of them work, setup with one, verify it is stable, add ONE drive, verify it is stable… continue until failure of you run out of drives…

[cafebabe]

I started this process on the NAS, one drive immediately seemed to be misbehaving so I left it out and ran up with the remaining three. But after a while realised I was getting inconsistent behaviour and OMV operations were either not completing or not available. So I switched to a desktop machine to re-test all the drives.
On the other machine I was able to format the 3 drives without issue.
The 4th appeared as a device and didn’t go away, it responded to smartctl but slowly (there was a 2-3 sec delay) while the other devices responded immediately. But it made gparted hang when I tried to create a file system. So definitely something not right with it.

So at this point I’m thinking I’ve found the culprit. So I put the 3 remaining (now ext 4 formatted) drives back in the NAS.

But I can’t get OMV to work with them .

They show as devices, but I can’t mount them.

I thought maybe ext4 was not compatible so tried to wipe them and it fails with this error every time:

Having what seem like 2 different problems makes me suspicious. So now I’m wondering has the EON NAS somehow (unstable power/SATA connection?) caused one drive to fail and is continuing to cause strange behaviour.

[cafebabe]

So now I try a single drive to eliminate the power overload cause:

Quick mode wipe:

File systems list is empty.

Try to create a file system, and the device dropdown is empty:

I don’t know why nothing works, ‘Device busy’ sounds like the problem, but don’t know why.

I’ve rebooted several times in the hope that clears something but no change.

These were 4 brand new quality HDDs, I can accept the bad luck of one of them being bad, but excluding it doesn’t make everything work so it’s more than that.

I need to be confident my NAS is going to be reliable, and this isn’t going well.

Help please.

[NHHiker]

I don’t use OMV. However, now that you know you have a bad drive, you might want to reset and reinstall OMV. Thought I read somewhere that someone had issues and reset, reinstalled OMV from scratch and fixed it…

That said… again I don’t use it.