Before I start, let me inform you that I have been working as an IT Manager for large international companies for my whole life, and I have received masters degree from IT technology. I therefore believe, I am fully competent to do what am doing now. However, now I face an uneasy challenge which I have never seen before. My troubleshooting is very limited because every single failure in solving it costs me significant amount of money.
I am working on my startup project, part of which is having a storage server with 72 TB of storage space. I have built the storage server myself, as I have built hundreds of PCs and servers before. My problem now is, that the server keeps destroying the hard drives.
After turning on the Server, all the hard drives either burn with a cloud of smoke and a burn mark on the HDD board or are not recognized on any other PC where I connect them to afterwards.
As my resources are limited, I have built my server from value parts where possible:
- Motherboard: ATX ASUS P5Q-E (used)
- CPU: Intel Dual Core (used)
- RAM 8GB (used)
- PSU: BeQuiet PowerZone 750 Watt(new)
- RAID Controller: Adaptec RAID 72405 (new)
- Chasis 20 Bay: Ri-vier TGC-4220 (new but not anymore offered)
- HDD: 12 * WD Red 4TB (new)
As you probably understand, I can not troubleshoot and test my progress on additional hard drives. Every failure would mean another HDD destroyed. I have destroyed already 12 of brand new WD Red 4TB HDDs.
I came here for an advice, how to troubleshoot and identify the broken component. Would purchasing a multimeter and measuring power output on key connectors help with my problem? How should I progress? Do you have any other idea?
What you believe can be causing the problem? Of course, all the connectors are correctly connected. This was the first thing I have checked. Moreover, they would not fit with any other connectors, so they are surely correctly connected. My motherboard behaves correctly, it does not randomly reboot.
In this situation any advice will be worth of considering. But please, remember, I do not have any spare PSU or chassis with 20 bays to replace and test again.
The 20-bay storage chassis has backplanes which connect the HDDs together. Do you think that there might be something wrong with the backplanes that would result in such problems?
Thank you in advance.