raid problem from bad sata cables? need some raid 5 input :)

[nervegrind3r]

weird, but this just happened to me for the second time. I have been recently having issues with drives dropping out of my raid 5 array after about a year of smooth sailing. Out of nowhere a few weeks ago, one of my drives goes down, I popped in a new hard drive, and during the rebuild another drive went down. Luckily, I didnt lose everything as I think it was just another read error on the 2nd drive, and I was able to get everything back online and rebuilt correctly.

So, I get my replacement drive, and am getting ready to get into the 2003 software to set it up as a hotswap, and then my raid dies again. WTF! The drive that went down was the same secondary drive that went down the first time. Ok, I replace the drive, and then I have the same exact issue where another drive in the array (this time drive 6) goes down while the array is rebuilding. So same exact problem, just with another drive.

So I have been messing with this all day, and couldnt get things to work properly. Finally, I swap out the sata cable for drive 3 (the one that failed first), pop that drive back in, and it works, is rebuilding properly, and I am able to work off the array while its rebuilding. Drive 6 is not bitching either.

hmmm, so the cable...again. Again because shortly after I got the card (highpoint 2220), I had the same problem where the array would keep going down, and eventually I found it was a single bad cable going to one of the drives.

So here are my questions after this weekends fiasco:

I am using standard sata cables that came with the drives. I think two failed cables is alot, and want to know what might cause this to happen?

are there better than average cables I can use for raid setup with sata drives? Right now I am using a mix of straight red sata cables that came with drives, and some angled to straight cables that I bought on ebay (needed to fit tight space in case).

Are there any good 3rd party management programs I can use to really check the status and health of a raid array? The software that comes with the card is basic black and white information.

also, I just found out that the wd drives 1tb green drives I use (non-raid edition) are not supported by WD for raid, and downloaded a utility to change the Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) time to 7 seconds. Are there any other tricks like this I should be aware of in general?

thanks

 

[nineball9]

I have a couple of RAID-0 SATA drives in a 2003 Falcon Northwest system. A drive died a few months after purchasing it which Falcon replaced but a few months later I stated getting random disc I/O errors.

A Falcon tech I spoke with noted that some of the SATA cables they were using (packaged w/ASUS mobo's I suspect) were sometimes faulty. In this instance, the plug end had two differing colored plastic components and for some reason, the cables were failing to the consternation of the Falcon techs. I was not the first Falcon customer to encounter the failing SATA cable problem, so they just shipped some replacement cables which have been working fine ever since.

Unless one builds systems with a hammer, most data cables are pretty durable. But as I discovered, they can fail.