Certain drives in RAID 5 set intermittently are not recognized

Posted by hydroparadise on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by hydroparadise
Published on 2011-11-15T16:48:17Z Indexed on 2011/11/15 17:54 UTC
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raid

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hard-drive

I have a curious problem in that 1 (sometimes 2) drives do not get recognized in a RAID 5 set. The server is getting rather old at 5 to 6 years, but still seems to function well once the machine sees all drives. So that leaves me with three areas to consider: the motherboard, the SATA RAID card, or the individual hard drives themselves. I am leaning toward the RAID card, but have not had much dealings with RAID cards. What would cause individual drives not to be recognized in the set? If it was the card, I would think that it would be all or nothing. If it were a single drive, is it possible that it would only work sometimes? The only other thing to consider is that that they are different drives (Seagate and Western Digital) but all around 80 GB.

SATA RAID controller is 3ware Escalade 8506-4LP
Motherboard is a SuperMicro P4SPA+

Am open and available for more details if needed...

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