OWC Mercury Pro Quad Randomly Disconnecting/No LED blinking

[OolongGoat]

I just purchased this enclosure about two days ago and I am having some weird issues with it.

I have 4x 16TB Seagate Exos drives in it. Drives are good, report healthy, and all is well on that front.

I made the RAID 5 with the SoftRAID software that the enclosure came with. Pretty straight forward and no issues there.

Now when I started to migrate the data from my Plex Server over to this enclosure, it starts to get weird.

The device has a Blue LED for power, and it is supposed to have Green LED over each drive bay indicating that the drive is being accessed.

At random points during the file transfer, the lights stop blinking and all that is on is the Blue LED. Windows will momentarily state that the destination is unavailable and pause the transfer. I can Retry, Skip File, or Cancel.

If I Retry or Skip, the transfer seems to continue though the activity lights don't blink indicating drive activity. So, I have been refreshing file explorer periodically to see what files have and haven't been moved.

This is rather annoying, and I haven't had an enclosure do this ever.

I have tried both OWC cables that came with the unit. I have also tried the device on my Intel Plex Server and now my AMD desktop, doing the transfer over the network. Same thing happens.

I have reached out to OWC support and am waiting on a reply.

I went through and turned off all USB power saving options/selective suspend/sleep, and all that just to try to eliminate it powering down to save energy.

 

[ir_cow]

You can use a program called TeraCopy. https://www.codesector.com/teracopy .

I started to use it when migrating files over from old drives. If there was a bad sector, windows exporer would time out and the drive disconnected. Doesn't happen with TeraCopy.

Seems like you may have a bad drive as well.

 

[OolongGoat]

Yeah, in my server right now, I have 4x 8TB Seagate.

Seagate BarraCuda 8TB 5400 RPM SATA III 6Gb/s 3.5" OEM Internal SMR Hard Drive - Micro Center

Get it now! Seagate brings over 20 years of trusted performance and reliability to the Seagate BarraCuda 3.5 inch hard drive.

www.microcenter.com

I bought these about 6 years ago and have them configured with Intel RST on the server motherboard. I am trying to migrate the data off of them. Been running 24/7 since purchase.

I will give that program a try and attached the OWC back to the Plex Server locally.


***UPDATE*** So far so good, it's about halfway through the transfer. Only one file was marked as offline, and then it resumed about a minute later and hasn't had any issues since.

I got about 7TB to go

 

[ir_cow]

That program is amazing. Still using the free version, but maybe I should pay up for how helpful it has been.

 

[OolongGoat]

I really do enjoy the program and will be using it more in the future for large transfers.

Upon verification, 80% or so of the data didn't match up, so I am doing a verify/rebuild on the source array.

I am awaiting to hear from OWC. My local Microcenter has very slim pickings on 4-bay enclosures. OWC or none. It is a shame that Drobo isn't around anymore.

If I play media off the source array, everything seems fine. I only noticed issues when I tried to migrate the data over.

 

[ir_cow]

The same file that fails to transfer plays okay?

 

[OolongGoat]

The files that fail to transfer, either don't play, stutter really bad, or are a completely different file all together. Definitely a transmission/communication issue.

 

[ir_cow]

Could be bad sectors. Hard to know for certain without a full drive check

 

[OolongGoat]

Yeah, I am in the middle of a RAID verify/rebuild on my source array now. Then I will scan the individual disks.

The source array has been verified and no errors detected. Only took about 9 hours lol.

I have it attached via USB 2.0 at present to do a smaller sample size for transfer.

****Update*** The USB 2.0 works fine. The USB 3.0 on the motherboard cause errors. Upon verifying the sample, about 75% or so come back with a hash mismatch.

I am using one of the USB ports on the front of the case. It is USB 3.0, but so far, no errors and the files are able to be verified.

I am thinking maybe the USB 3.0 ports on the back of the motherboard are having a power issue or signaling issue that causes the problems.

I have a lone external drive with a 14TB Iron Wolf Pro attached to the USB 3.0 that's been running for years without issue. Maybe the OWC Enclosure is too much for the ports on the board.

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z690M-ITXax/index.asp <--- this is the motherboard in question