Keep losing RAID device

[Crucificator]

Chris Mason wrote:

>I have a redhat 9 server with 6 drives, four of which are 160GB drives in a
>RAID 5 config. Each time I reboot I loose one of the raid devices. However,
>I can reinsert the drive without problem and it is synced again. However, as
>it takes nearly four hours to resync, this is a pain. Any ideas why the
>drive is being rejected on boot? I don't see any problems with the drive
>otherwise and I run smartd to monitor all the drives.
>
>[root at munster root]# dmesg|grep hdg
>
>    ide3: BM-DMA at 0x7008-0x700f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:pio
>hdg: WDC WD1600JB-00EVA0, ATA DISK drive
>hdg: attached ide-disk driver.
>hdg: host protected area => 1
>hdg: 312581808 sectors (160042 MB) w/8192KiB Cache, CHS=19457/255/63,
>UDMA(100)
> hdg: unknown partition table
>md0: former device hdg is unavailable, removing from array!
>md0: former device hdg is unavailable, removing from array!
>md: trying to hot-add hdg to md0 ... 
>md: bind<hdg,4>
>md: hdg [events: 00000055]<6>(write) hdg's sb offset: 156290816
>md0: resyncing spare disk hdg to replace failed disk
>
>
>[root at munster root]# mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/hdg
>
>mdadm: hot added /dev/hdg
>
>[root at munster root]# cat /proc/mdstat
>Personalities : [raid5] 
>read_ahead 1024 sectors
>md0 : active raid5 hdg[4] hde1[0] hdi1[2] hdk1[3]
>      468864768 blocks level 5, 32k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [U_UU]
>      [>....................]  recovery =  0.0% (88552/156288256)
>finish=235.0min speed=11069K/sec
>unused devices: <none>
>
>
>
>Chris Mason
>
>
>  
>
Can you tell us more about your hardware? (mainboard, controller, disks)
How did you managed to get RAID5 working with only 4 drives?
Please be more specific.