Running out of storage (part 4) 2026-07-19
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Well… failures keep to pop up. When suspecting power supply issues,
I tried to add capacitors to the 2.5″ disks.

Adding capacitor

To no avail. I seem to have damaged one of the boards in the process. However, this is also the board that was attached to the disks that I have now ruled to be the culprit.

I have connected said disk, using another interface board,through the powered hub, to my pc, and then dd’d its content to /dev/null


[root@mortar andre]# dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null status=progress
28753003008 bytes (29 GB, 27 GiB) gekopieerd, 657 s, 43,8 MB/s
dd: fout bij lezen van '/dev/sdb': Invoer-/uitvoerfout
56199168+0 records gelezen
56199168+0 records geschreven
28773974016 bytes (29 GB, 27 GiB) gekopieerd, 670,486 s, 42,9 MB/s

I have repeated this with the disk connected directly to the USB port:


[root@mortar andre]# dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null status=progress
28709893120 bytes (29 GB, 27 GiB) gekopieerd, 337 s, 85,2 MB/s
dd: fout bij lezen van '/dev/sdb': Invoer-/uitvoerfout
56199168+0 records gelezen
56199168+0 records geschreven
28773974016 bytes (29 GB, 27 GiB) gekopieerd, 347,836 s, 82,7 MB/s

And it fails at exactly the same point. Now, I think the conclusion is that the fault lies at this disk.

As a sanity check, I have tested the disk connected to a native SATA interface:

[root@8570w andre]# dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/null status=progress
29320929280 bytes (29 GB, 27 GiB) gekopieerd, 366 s, 80,1 MB/s
dd: fout bij lezen van '/dev/sdc': Invoer-/uitvoerfout
57267440+0 records gelezen
57267440+0 records geschreven
29320929280 bytes (29 GB, 27 GiB) gekopieerd, 374,466 s, 78,3 MB/s

While not exactly at the same spot, close enough to confirm it’s the disk and not some USB to SATA adapter issue.

The interface board failure, it might have been my soldering of the capacitor. Perhaps ESD, perhaps I have touched something in the process.

Anyhow, this disk is written off. While its SMART results say it’s PASSED, it’s no good. I have desoldered the capacitor from the other disk interface board, and I am reading the content of the Western Digital 2.5″ disk. Just to see what happens… just to confirm this is the right conclusion, and that the interface board is still fine. It seems the interface board also has issues, but with a new interface board, the disks check out fine.

Now, let’s see if we can make a 4-disk array.