two drives in my raid 5 server went down within a few minutes.....need some advice

[nervegrind3r]

running a 2k3 server with 6 x 1tb hard drives connected to a highpoint 2220 raid 5 controller. Server is not powered on alot, and drives are maybe a year old.

anyway, I was copying files from my pc to server, and my raid card starts beeping. Checked, and one of the drives is down (WTF!) Like a minute later, it goes into rebuild mode but it doesnt list the rebuild time like I have seen before. I check the smart status and all the drives are running fine, even though one of the drives says critical.

I wanted to let the copy process finish, which it normally can do but in degraded mode. a few minutes later, beeping again. Now it says another drive in the array failed, and the array dismounted itself. I shit mself because I have about 5tb of data on there.

anyway, I rebooted, and went into the raid cards bios, and it shows all the drives are fine, but the array is still critical. okay, as long as it can rebuild, im happy, and I was hoping it was a just a weird glitch because if 2 drives go down in raid 5, you are SOL. So I reboot, the array came up, and I could view my files, but its in rebuild mode. A few minutes later, same thing, 2nd drive failed, array goes offline.

I can only rebuild 1 drive at a time, and I do have a spare drive, but I find it very hard to believe one drive died, and then a second one really died a minutes later.

any advice/ideas how to check if either drive is actually bad, or if its something else?

 

[RebateMonger]

I've seen more than one case where flaky data or power connections to the hard drives took out a RAID array. At the very least, I'd reseat all the physical connections.

Originally posted by: nervegrind3r
Like a minute later, it goes into rebuild mode but it doesnt list the rebuild time like I have seen before.

Does "like I have seen before" mean that you've lost a hard drive on that array before?

 

[nervegrind3r]

Originally posted by: RebateMonger
I've seen more than one case where flaky data or power connections to the hard drives took out a RAID array. At the very least, I'd reseat all the physical connections.

Originally posted by: nervegrind3r
Like a minute later, it goes into rebuild mode but it doesnt list the rebuild time like I have seen before.

Does "like I have seen before" mean that you've lost a hard drive on that array before?

ive see that too personally. I had a problem where a sata cable went bad a month after I put the array up, and it was going down everyday.

I took a chance and just swapped out the first drive that kept going down last night and the array rebuild actually finished in about 5 hours. I think the 2nd drive that kept dropping out was just like a glitch because the 1st one would drop out. Luckily all my data is still there and in tact.

 

[RebateMonger]

I figured you were already familiar with this, but I guess I should mention it just in case, since you mention having to rebuild your RAID 5 array more than once:

ZDNET: Why RAID 5 stops working in 2009

I haven't built a RAID 5 array in years, so I don't know how big an issue it is in real life. But your setup certainly matches the scenario discussed (second disk read failures during a RAID 5 rebuild).