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SQUID x16 powering issue or ***** drives?

zedsdeadbaby

zedsdeadbaby

macrumors regular
Original poster
Oct 27, 2016
145
64
I have a SQUID with 3 Kingston HyperX Predators in the x16 slot of my 2009 cMP. Two of the three Predators failed back to back, 1 day apart. I get the message to initialize and when I do Disk Utility opens up and the drive shows up greyed out, spinning, and never initializing. Rebooting brings up the initialization message, any attempts to format yields the message last block couldn't be written to and formatting fails.

The 3rd Predator, my OS drive, is being reported as having issues by drive DX as well. These were all bought from New Egg, brand new, and installed within two-three weeks of each other, and this has happened only over the past 2 1/2 days.

I've never been particularly confident in Kingston but 3 drives failing or showing issues back to back seems really really odd.

Wondering if anyone has had any issues with their SQUID, if it sounds like the slot/power supply might be suspect, or if the predators have been known to fail with unusually high rates...

I'll be bringing the machine into a local place that does authorized service and legacy repairs but am SOL until Monday so thought I'd parse the forum until then...
 
Just curious... Did you have Trim enabled?

Years ago, on my first SSD, I thought it was failing but, in fact, it just need some garbage collection and it returned full working order and is still in use to this day.
 
Yes. I did trimforce enable after El Cap was done installing. I also checked each drive in System Profiler to be absolutely sure as well and all show TRIM support. DriveDx says there are tons of bad blocks on two of the 3 drives, but one reported Power Cycle I/O errors which had me wondering if the card had a power issue...

The report specifically said: "I/O errors could have software or hardware nature. In the latter case repeated I/O errors can indicate a failing drive or problems with power or data cables."

Either way I may run the trimforce command again for the hell of it.... I've also contacted Amfeltec and we're running though a few checks.
 
hmm i'd move the card to a diff slot then reset pram and smc. then boot off a different drive and try to format.
 
Thanks, will do. For the moment I got everything cloned and will try another slot and see what happens...
 
So I've been in contact with Amfeltec. They went in depth about how due to how the board is designed it's very unlikely I would see 3 drives fail at the same time if the card were bad. (It has to do with how it receives and handles power...)
Kingston hasn't been helpful, and after this I'll steer clear of their drives in the future...

I did find something interesting though... One drive is completely totast, it won't even initialize and if I try and format it says it couldn't write to the last block of the drive. Another drive shows up as having bad blocks in drive Dx but is now working. And the 3rd drive came back from the dead after I disabled Trim, rebooted, and did Trimforce enable and rebooted. (This also brought the second drive back from the dead.)

Looks like even though drives show up as having Trim enabled it isn't necessarily working. From here out I plan on disabling trimforce, rebooting, re-enabling and rebooting for each new drive. Seems like macOS shows trim as being enabled when it may not necessarily be enabled...
 
A PCIe slot delivers 75W and Apple follows the standard 100%. The PLX chip has a TDP of less than 7W, a PCIe SSD less than 10.

From that point - outside that +40W are a LOT of heat you would immediately feel near - power cannot be the issue. The Pro also turns itself off if you try to draw more on a PCIe slot or the Aux power.

My Kingston runs fine.. for now?
 
I have seen that cannot format the last block error.

It was on a brand new Samsung 850 Pro drive, I had it connected via an external firewire adapter.
I then just mounted it directly into the mac pro 5,1 and Sierra formatted it with no errors.

I think its a software bug of some sort.
 
Thanks Willam. Yeah power's not the issue, I was just in a panic when I posted this and hoping someone might have had an answer since the odds of seeing 3 fail essentially at the same time are incredibly low. All that said that appears to be what happened here... 3 failures within a day of each other.

Amfeltec explained that the card powers two drives from the slot and 2 from onboard power, so if it were an issue with the card it would be more likely to see two fail, and even then the cards aren't known to fail, and suspected the drives were the issue... (They did offer to RMA it though... Amfeltec have been great, Kingston not so much...) Anyway, appreciate explaining what to expect if I had power supply issues.

One of the cards on the Squid originally came with a Kingston host card so I put each drive on there. I got the exact same messages in Drive DX, and the drive that wouldn't initialize also would not using only that card.I also booted into an old 10.9 partition and attempted to initialize there and no go either... The drive's unusable...

The interesting thing is that the other two came back to life after disabling then re-enabling trim. The only answer there appears to be that despite the drives showing up as having trim enabled, garbage collection occured on two of them only after re-eabling it. Odd...

None of my other SSDs have had any issues whatsoever though so at the end of the day I won't be buying Kingston again. It's the only culprit I can point a finger at...
 
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I suspect OSX as issue by now also though, i killed a bunch SM951's the same way as you experience - one not recoverable, the others with low level format (by Samsung tool on Windows)...
 
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