Odd Behavior with Obsidian 800D Hot-Swap Bay -Anyone Seen This?

Hello All,

 

New to the community - looking forward to learning from all of you.

 

I have a curious problem that maybe someone else has had, or may at least recognize... I have the USB 3.0 Obsidian 800D. I did not do the build myself, but came across this system second-hand. I bought it with no drives and then added the Samsung 256GB 850 Pro and the Seagate Baracuda. At one point I wanted to retrieve some data off of an old SATA drive from an old system - a small 80GB HDD. Using the very handy hot-swap bays I popped the drive into a sled and plugged it in. I was powered down at the time, but I brought the system up and the drive was recognized, no problem. Got some of the data I needed and that was that.

 

A few days later, I clicked on the drive letter and the volume appeared empty - formatted, but with no data. Then, the next time I booted up (I don't re-boot often) the disk activity light was in an always-on state. The drive letter for that drive was gone. An old drive, I figured it failed. That's life. My system also had problems booting with the drive plugged in, so I pulled it.

 

Then I had a 1TB USB drive with a flaky controller, so I pulled it from the USB case and plugged it into one of the bays. My system wouldn't even boot. I tried another bay - same problem. So on a hunch, I put the 80GB drive into a USB case and sure enough, it was working flawlessly and all of the data was intact.

 

Curiously, even though it is apparent there is some issue with the drive bays, my Samsung and Seagate drives seem strangely unaffected.

 

Has anyone seen this kind of failure with the hot swap bays before? What should I be looking for as the root of the problem? And why aren't the other drives showing the same symptoms?

 

Any and all help/advice greatly appreciated.

 

Kind regards,

MHF

I have heard of problems with hot swap bays in the past. I would try testing all the bays with a known good drive to see which ones work and which don't. Then, swap the cables from one that does to one that doesn't work and test again. This will tell you whether the backplate is at fault, or whether you have a dodgy power or signal cable. I suspect that it will most likely be the backplate.

It probably has the sata2 backplate instead of the sata3 so it may cause issues, don't try and find a sata3 backplate, they no longer exist!

ANYWHERE!

I have heard of problems with hot swap bays in the past. I would try testing all the bays with a known good drive to see which ones work and which don't. Then, swap the cables from one that does to one that doesn't work and test again. This will tell you whether the backplate is at fault, or whether you have a dodgy power or signal cable. I suspect that it will most likely be the backplate.

 

Hey, thanks - I'm hoping it's just some bad cables. Not thrilled about the potential of having to break it down and swap out the backplate. Never have the time (according to my wife, anyway) for hardware installs. And it probably is the SATA 3 backplate, judging from the guy I got the rig from. He had THREE GTX 690's at one point, when they were new!

 

Anyway, maybe once the wife goes to sleep I'll have a chance to get in there and do some process of elimination. Will let you know how it works out, and it's likely I'll have another Q or two...

 

Just out of curiosity, are these backplates known to go bad? That would make the whole hot-swap bay feature kind of pointles.

 

Thanks again,

MHF

It shouldn't go bad but the SATA 2 backplate is in 4 pieces, the SATA 3 is a single part.

 

You can remove it and bypass it if needs be but then you lose the hotswap.