RAID 1 Drives rebuilding and then failing

[NewSysAdmin]

I have a Dell Poweredge 1900 with two RAID arrays on it - RAID 5 and RAID 1. A month-ish ago I realized that two drives in the RAID 1 were listed as failed. (There were 3 total drives - I assume one had been a hot swap) I swapped out just 1 drive (drive 6), since we had one functioning drive (drive 4) still let in the RAID 1. It rebuilt fine. Later that week the drive 4 failed. I swapped out that one it rebuilt fine. Approximately 2 week later, I replaced the RAID controller battery. (It also had been listed as failed). When I powered the machine back on after replacing the battery, drive 6 went foreign and needed to be rebuilt. After it finished rebuilding, I turned the machine back on (because I had to do this all from the configuration boot menu), and the drive listed as normal for about 15 minutes and then switched back over to failed. I assumed we had just purchased a bad drive since drive 4 was still fine. I got a new drive and stuck it in the drive 5 slot and let it rebuild. It did the same thing as drive 6 - listed normal afterwards and then switched over to failed shortly there after. However, this whole time, drive 4 has been fine and the RAID 5 array has been fine. Has anyone come across anything like this before? A colleague suggested that it could be the RAID controller card and some google researched suggested bad SATA cables.

 

[saint19]

I have a Dell Poweredge 1900 with two RAID arrays on it - RAID 5 and RAID 1. A month-ish ago I realized that two drives in the RAID 1 were listed as failed. (There were 3 total drives - I assume one had been a hot swap) I swapped out just 1 drive (drive 6), since we had one functioning drive (drive 4) still let in the RAID 1. It rebuilt fine. Later that week the drive 4 failed. I swapped out that one it rebuilt fine. Approximately 2 week later, I replaced the RAID controller battery. (It also had been listed as failed). When I powered the machine back on after replacing the battery, drive 6 went foreign and needed to be rebuilt. After it finished rebuilding, I turned the machine back on (because I had to do this all from the configuration boot menu), and the drive listed as normal for about 15 minutes and then switched back over to failed. I assumed we had just purchased a bad drive since drive 4 was still fine. I got a new drive and stuck it in the drive 5 slot and let it rebuild. It did the same thing as drive 6 - listed normal afterwards and then switched over to failed shortly there after. However, this whole time, drive 4 has been fine and the RAID 5 array has been fine. Has anyone come across anything like this before? A colleague suggested that it could be the RAID controller card and some google researched suggested bad SATA cables.

Hi and welcome to Tom's forum.

I had the same problem but with an HP P2000 storage, my solution was install the disk in another slot than the original one. That was 1 week ago and until now the disk is working without problems.

 

[NewSysAdmin]

Ok. I'll try rebuilding in another slot and see if it makes a difference.

 

[NewSysAdmin]

Ok, That actually seems to be working... which is odd because a drive failed in this slot originally which is what started this mess. Maybe it had something to do with a major storm we had here back around the time this happened. Dunno. I'm going to watch it for a while to make sure it doesn't fail again. Thanks for your help!