Q: After years of stability, FW800 drives now randomly disappearing
I have a Mac Mini circa-2009 with 6 2TB G-Drives attached via FireWire 800 and configured as a 6 TB mirrored RAID volume. My system has been configured this way for about 4 years.
About three months ago I began to have problems with the volume randomly disappearing (improper disk eject). It happens when the drives are idle and when there is heavy i/o activity - makes no difference. When this problem started, the volume was configured with AppleRAID and the drives were daisy-chained, one to another, off the back of my Mac Mini. I have since turned off all energy management features, replaced cables, moved from AppleRAID to SoftRAID, reset the Mac Mini, reinstalled OS X, done a partial drive swap, turned off Spotlight, put a fan on the drives to lower their operating temps, and installed a powered Nitro AV hub to eliminate the daisy chain. No substantive change - they don’t drop out as much, but it still happens regularly (every 24-48 hours).
Interestingly, not all 6 drives disappear. Sometimes times it is just one, or maybe two or three, or even five of six. I cannot decipher a pattern. I find it odd that only some drives drop out and which ones are different each time. Sometimes rebooting will bring them back, but not always. The only sure method to bring the drive back on line is to cycle the power on the drive.
The one constant I have observed more recently is there is always this FireWire error a few seconds to a minute before the drives drop out “Lucent ID 5901 built-in: handleUnrecoverableErrorInt.” I’ve done some research and not found much - more about audio issues than drives.
Before I moved to SoftRAID, which has a proprietary driver limiting me to one PC, I moved the disks to another circa-2009 machine (a MBP). The problem was still present but not as bad. Maybe an obscure issue with some interaction between El Capitan and my older hardware?
This problem has led to significant data corruption issues and too many hours of troubleshooting headaches and so I am finished with FW and moving to a Synology NAS. I thought I would check here though to see if there is new thinking on this old topic or anything obvious I may have missed in my troubleshooting.
Thanks.
Mac mini, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5), null
Posted on Aug 15, 2016 8:48 AM