SATA Drives not Detected in BIOS or in any OS that is installed

[clintiot]

I recently received my new ZimaCube Pro and purchased 6 x 8TB Seagate Ironwolf Pro SATA HDDs Model ST8000NT001 to go inside. I planned to move from my trusty Synology DS916+ (8GB Ram + 4 x 3TB Drives) over to the ZimaCube Pro.

Using one of these new Seagate drives on a ZimaBoard and ZimaBlade was fine, was detected by CasaOS. All OK

Using one of these new Seagate drives with my existing Synology DS916+ was fine, was detected without shutting down the Synology NAS.

Connecting these new HDD was easy enough to the ZimaCube, but not detected in ZimaOS.
I restarted a few times, upgraded to ZimaOS 1.2.1 still nothing showing.

So I then went into Old Stool tech support / troubleshoot mode and started at the BIOS.
I didn’t need to look any further. the Drives were not being detected / seen in the BIOS (See screenshot), saying that each SATA slot was empty.

I installed some NVME Drives in the 7th Bay and they were detected in BIOS, but not in ZimaOS.

I then continued to troubleshoot and understand what the issue may be, so installed an old Laptop HDD and that displayed in ZimaCube Pro BIOS, it was also detected in ZimaOS.

So then I though, hmm, do I have 6 x Faulty HDD… highly unlikely.

So I then installed one of the Disks into the Synology, and it was detected no problems.

Am I missing something here?
Could a BIOS Update fix this?
Is it a Hardware issue?
Is Icewhale using an Older SATA Standard 3.2 from 2013?
With no list of supported Drives, it was assumed that any NAS / Pro SATA HDD would work. And that ZimaCube would be the same or better than Synology Hardware, considering it is at least 8 Years newer Hardweare and Tech.

Im not giving up hope, just putting it out there for other like me, who may come across the same issue, thinking that they were going crazy

New HDD Cost + ZimmaCube Cost = slight anxiety that I have wasted money… hate this feeling.(Especially after such good experience with 10’s of ZimaBoards and Several ZimaBlade hardware)

Can anyone shed light on this HDD detection issue?
(I think an OLD SATA Standard is being used, and newer modern Drives will have the same issues with ZimaCube, unless they update to a SATA Standard from 2016 onwards - SATA - Wikipedia)

[dfarning]

My HHDs are showing up but my SSDs are not.

I went through the same basic debug process:

1. Verified that the drives worked in a laptop.
2. Used gparted to remove any old formatining and partition information.
3. Visibly checked that each connector is seated properly.

I contacted support@icewhale.org last night. I am waiting for a response when people get back in the office Monday.

I agree, I went a little bonkers trying to figure out what is happening.

It didn’t help that ZimaOS didn’t recognize my HHDs at first. After some investigation, I saw that Bios correctly identified them, and they were reported by lsblk. I booted the Zimacube with a Ubuntu live USB and removed all formatting and portion information from the drives. Then ZimaOS saw them. The HDD were older drives that were last used as part of a Synology raid array,

I was allready pretty exasperated by the time I started digging into the SSD issue.

[clintiot]

You were lucky, as the Drives were detected in BIOS.
I think your issue was the HDDs had already been formatted / Used for something else and were in a Partitition / Format that couldn’t be read by ZimaOS.
Others have this issue when connecting Disks into MacOS too (Im sure other OS also) but in MacOS its much more obvious, as you can see the drive in Disk Utility, and it looks like its empty, but doesn’t mount. Even if you try to format the drive in MacOS it doesn’t retrieve the whole drive, only the partitions it can see. Resulting in the need for using a terminal command or a utility to like balenaEtcher to wife the drive or image the disk with something so the OS sees it.

[777-Spider]

@clintiot

Seagate Ironwolf Pro SATA

We noticed that you are using an enterprise-class hard drive, which may have a 3.3V pin problem. Some enterprise-class hard drives may not boot up when receiving 3.3V voltage. You can try shielding the 3.3V pin on the hard drive (usually the third pin on the power connector) to see if this solves the problem. You can use tape or other insulating materials for shielding.
like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/890juk/33v_pin_fix_for_wd_white_labels_video/?share_id=kSxFcNdetGHa2EuKBA9ag
Looking forward to your feedback!

[777-Spider]

Are you using ZimaOS or else operating system?
If ZimaOS,please check this link:[Tutorial]Solution for the Display Issue of the ZimaCube 7th Bay

[clintiot]

Can you confirm what SATA Standard is used in ZimaCube?

Can you explain why these Pro HDD work in Zimaboard and Not ZimaCube?

[clintiot]

Have Tried ZimaOS and Proxmox. Both will not see the HDD if the BIOS does not see them

[dfarning]

My issue is that the SSD on the tray do not show up in lsblk.

[cosmic.hippo]

Hey, I am on the same drive, but 14TB model, I have four of them.

I was not able to get any progress, using the tape or without the tape. Hopefully there are some more ideas soon.

[clintiot]

The more I look at this, it seems as a hardware issue with the ZimaCube.

Asking a customer to tape over pins is not a reliable or secure way to operate a storage pool or mirror or striped disks. All it would take is for one or more tape to dislodge and you loose your RAID and your data.

Icewhale are yet to confirm what SATA Revision they used. It seems as they used SATA 3.2 (2013) or earlier revision.

It strange as these disks work with their ZimaBoards and Blade Hardware.

[dfarning]

@clintiot,
I think this is a standards issue that is biting manufacturers in the ass who depend on drives being commodity items.

For a while, we have seen a trend where vendors who sell storage systems try to push customers to only use drives approved from their list, which they happen to sell at a markup. We are seeing Synology units that won’t turn on or limit their feature set if unapproved drives are detected.

Various drive and storage vendors play games with how they can stay within the standards while limiting what drives work with what systems.

Just like with printers, consumers pay close attention to the original device cost, but often overlook the cost of consumables. Which is ironic that in the case of a ZimaCube, the cube is less than 25% of the total cost of NAS + RAM + HHDs + SSDs.

That being said, the situation is no less frustrating for you as a consumer who spent a chunk of money on a system that does not work.

[jbroome]

Similar issue:
Using two WD Shucked 10TB drives that were previously in a synology two bay unit.

I’ve ruled out the 3.3V sata pin issue by removing it entirely, and confirm that both these disks show up in a “normal” linux machine. I’ve wiped both drives and set the disk label to GPT, they still don’t show up in the OS on the cube.

I was hoping to be able to reuse these, and have to buy fewer new drives, but now that I’m seeing people are having issues with Enterprise drives showing up to the HW, i’m going to hold off on spending (more) money.

[cosmic.hippo]

@777-Spider PMd me on discord and they are going to investigate.

For those with issues with iron wolf pro, here’s the thread there

Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games

[jbroome]

My Boomer opinion is that if there’s a support forum thread with a lot of people having the same issue, and you’re the vendor, you reply IN THAT THREAD, instead of picking one person out of the thread (for some reason NOT the OP), and DM them about it.

[scyto]

I have new 6 brand new ST24000NT002 and really weird issues.

turned out to be a faulty drive, it would make other drives drop off the backplane, cause randomness as to what was detected in the BIOS each boot

other things i noted duing tearing my hear out:

1. its possible to not put the drive sleds in correctly and close the handles down - took me ages one time to realize i hadn’t actualy put all the drives in the same way
2. sometimes the BIOS does seem to have issues detecting but once in zima OS you can see them

its also possible to have faulty backplanes / PSUs whatever

[777-Spider]

Sorry, we are actively researching this issue and will update you if there is any progress.

[777-Spider]

Hi,all

Please note that the hard disk plugging and unplugging operation must be performed with the computer turned off:

1. Please check the disk status in BIOS.
2. Run the lsblk command to check the disk status.

If your disk does not appear in these two interfaces, please contact support@icewhale.org to replace the backplane.