I have a 600gb Raid 5 array made up of 6 160gb Maxtor PATA drives and a Promise SX6000 card with 128mb of ram. 5 drives make up the array and the sixth is a hot spare. This is installed on an older Asus socket7 board running Win2k and not much else. Its function is to hold dvd's for my theater. I access it via lan from the HTPC running Xlobby as the front end. I have been running this system for a couple of years.

Since the beginning I have been plagued with issues. More than once the array has gone done with simitaneous drive failures. Yep, more than one drive being seen as bad at the same time. In the beginning I had to rebuild the array and than rerip all of my dvd's a MAJOR pita. I finally learned that I could just delete the array and than make a new one exactly like the old one, start it up with no init and no sync and it would come back up with the data intact! The system has been running flawlessly for months. Last night I looked at the array and found that it was rebuilding itself due to a single drive failure. OK, Thats possible. This morning it was rebuilding itself again, back to the drive it said was bad last night. These are drives 1 and 2. All drives are configured as single masters. Drive temeratures are in the 110 F range, drive voltages are 11.85 and 4.87 as repoted by PAM. All 6 drives are mounted in Promise slide in drive enclosures. I have replaced the PS with a quality unit some time ago. Any ideas as to what might be going on?

Charles

If no one can provide some assistance here, I've learned a lot from the StorageReview.com forums...I have a 2 TB SATA array using a 3ware card and it has run smoothly from day 1 now for about 10 months...I'm using 8 Seagate 300 GB SATA drives with 5 year warranties...

Randy

I'm looking at setting up a RAID system for fileserver and backup purposes, to be accessed by multiple machines on a network.

Jujst recently saw this NAS solution, called the Yellow Machine: http://www.anthologysolutions.com/products/index.htm

There's a review here:
http://www.xyzcomputing.com/index.php?op...mp;limitstart=0

Any opinions? I do wish it was SATA instead of PATA, and offered a gigabit switch...

Bruno

I can't offer any help except I had alot of the same issues with the same card under Linux. It would get better or worse depending on the channels the drives were plugged into. I finally got it to the point where it would do 3 drives on 4, 5, and 6 with no problems for a couple years. I eventually tossed it in favor of a 3ware card.

I think you hit it on the head. This Promise card has issues.

Not a bad looking NAS. Pretty tempting. As offered it is a 750MB raid5 unit.

What 3ware card are you guys using? I'm looking at a 7500-8 and a 7506-8. It looks like the 7500 will work just fine as long as it is a rebadged 7850 and not a 7810. The former has R5 Fusion for raid 5 and the later does not.

As others have stated.. Promise cards are crap.. I recently built an array for my home server using 5x 300GB sata drives on a couple of cheap 4 port silicon image cards. I decided to bypass all the mucking around with raid boards, and just build the array using linux software raid. The box does very little more than push files to a couple other machines, so I built it out of an old dual athlon I had around.

I'm using a 3Ware 9500S-8, and I bought it from Newegg.com. It has been absolutely perfect and stable. It cost a bit of $$$, but has been worth it...

Randy