RAID 5 Multiple Hard-drives failure
Reuben D. Budiardja
techlist at pathfinder.phys.utk.edu
Tue Mar 14 13:21:27 UTC 2006
Hello,
First, I apologize if this is rather OT.
I had multiple hard-drives failure yesterday on a RAID 5 array. Two out of
three drives died almost at the same time, rendering the RAID array useless.
I tried to recover by doing --assembly and even --assembly --force but it
failed. The raid device /dev/md0 run with damaged fail system after that, and
fsck would not fixed it, and message scrolled on the screen and log files
indicating that writing to the two drives were really failed. SMART reported
the same thing. So I lost all data.
There is a very very small probabilities that something like this can happen.
However, in the last two years, I've had a strings of bad luck with these
hard drives: all Maxtor DiamondMax 250 GB IDE HD. In the last two years, I
had 4 drives failure with these drives (including the ones yesterday). The
two failures in the past, I had a replacement drives sent for both of them
since they were under warranty and it indicated a fail drive with Maxtor's
diagnostic software.
I am using these consumer level drives thinking that I could build a rather
cheap backup system. The machine, running RAID 5, did backup for some
machines in the network using rsnapshot, twice a day. The size of data being
backed-up is about 250~300GB. The hard drives is on a Promise controller
running software RAID 5
So my questions having said all that, is there any thing else other than a
real hard-drive problem that would cause something like this ?
In other words, could the problem be in the controller, motherboard, etc other
than the hard drive itself that would cause hard-drives to fail like that ?
Or is it just Maxtor makes bad drives ?
Or is a consumer level hard-drive just cannot be used for this kind of work
I am hoping for comments, etc. Thank you in advance.
RDB
--
Reuben D. Budiardja
Dept. Physics and Astronomy
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN
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