Strange case of vanishing disk

[Kaya Saman]

this is a very strange issue but I guess will either be related to 2
things, PSU not being powerful enough or disk controller simply being crap.

> Here's what's going on. I have a little Chenbro 4 disk mini-ITX NAS
> server with 2x 2TB disks and 2x4TB disks as storage - all spread out
> over 2 ZFS storage pools. Additionally I am running the root file system
> on a 40GB SSD.

[...]
> _______
>
> One thing I can think of is to disconnect the questionable disk from the RAID controller card and connect it directly to the motherboard.
>
> Then you'd know whether the fault is with the hard drive or the RAID controller.
>
> PSU = power supply unit?  180 watts seems very little, I didn't know any modern system could run on so little.  I thought the minimum would be around 400 watts, and this would not allow for a powerful gaming graphics card.
>
> Maybe you need to replace the power supply with something having more watts, but make sure it will physically fit.
>
> Tom

Thanks for the response!

Here's some more info that I managed to dig up:

Jun  4 02:39:19 Zeta-Ray root: ZFS: vdev I/O failure, zpool=ZFS_POOL_2 
path=/dev/ad4 offset=270336 size=8192 error=6
Jun  4 02:39:19 Zeta-Ray kernel: ata2: port is not ready (timeout 
15000ms) tfd = 000000ff
Jun  4 02:39:19 Zeta-Ray kernel: ata2: hardware reset timeout
Jun  4 02:39:19 Zeta-Ray kernel: unknown: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA48 retrying 
(1 retry left) LBA=269091394


Yeah, 180 Watts is what comes with the chassis as it's an external power 
supply. Additionally the system is a Mini-ITX so that would account for 
less power usage however, in this case I think it might be the PSU 
that's simply not providing enough power.....


I will definitely try sticking the "downed" disk into the motherboard 
controller directly as that will tell me if the disk is the issue or not.


I'm also thinking to eliminate the issue of using external controller to 
just get a new system board that 6x SATA connectors on it instead of 4 
as per my board.


Regards,


Kaya