PowerMac G5 internal RAID problem + external HD advice needed

[cb911]

hey all,

I've been having some problems with this setup of mine for a while now. I have a 2GHz PowerMac G5 with G5DriveBracket and a RocketRAID Controller Card giving 4 internal drives setup as RAID10. The problem is that randomly the individual drives will register as 'disconnected' and set off the alarm on the controller card. i'm have no idea why it does this, but after a reboot sometimes it comes back online fine, other times it needs to rebuild the array, and yet other times the RAID drive won't show up in Finder at all - and if i log into the RAID controller it doesn't show any drives connected either.

I can't go on with these drives dropping out like this, so i need to either find a solution for why it's doing this, or i'm just going to take 3 of the drives out and run them with my 2 existing external HD's (which both have FW).

so first of all, does anyone have ideas as to why the HD's on the RAID are failing like this? Could it be because i need a bigger power supply to power all of them? Or could the Controller Card itself be damaged? I've checked all the cables, they're connected properly... or could there be too much heat around the drives?

Now with the external enclosures... i want to use my existing drives. I'm thinking that Firewire is the best option since i'll be using it for video work. Unless anyone can think of a better option...? I was curious about how eSATA would go - i would have to give up one of the standard SATA connectors to do this, which i'd rather not do. Is there any sort of "SATA splitter cable" that i could use? And then could the eSATA drives be daisy-chained?

Thanks for any help on this, this has been a problem for quite a while now, i'm finally going to fix this one way or another (i think i'll be ditching this RAID card...)

Cheers.

 

[9Charms]

The random disconnects really sounds like a power supply issue. It could also be a Leopard issue. My G4 RAID does not like Leopard; I had to go back to Tiger. (note the astute use of a semi-colon ).

Another possibility is one of your HD's is bad. If you're going to destroy your array, you might want to consider formatting each HD as an individual volume and see if any of them disappear on you. Finally, check your controller card settings, you may have a setting that measures HD temp and your acceptable range may be too small.

As for the external solution, I would go with eSata. You can use the same SATA connectors from your controller card, so you don't lose a port and don't need a "SATA splitter," which incidentally does exist. (I think its called a "port multiplier" or something like that. People modding MacMinis were using).

You can find a SATA to eSata converter cable at your local PC shop. eSATA is just soooo much faster than Firewire.

 

[cb911]

i wouldn't say that it's an issue with Leopard... since i'm still using Tiger.

i also wouldn't think that any one of the HD's are bad... since they all do come back online after a shutdown. but having said that... just this morning i've had the RAID alarm go off, and i've rebooted and shutdown a couple of times now, and the RAID hasn't come back up yet. i was just in the process of backing up to some other external drives as well...

i tried to check the temperature settings... there doesn't seem to be an option for that in the driver.

if i could finish backing up the stuff off the RAID i would format it as JBOD to see what happened...

the other thing to consider is cables - is it likely that the SATA cables from the Controller could have just gotten old...? I've only had this card for about 2 years. the cables haven't been moved at all since i installed it.

well i've got 3 external HD enclosures on order, prolly won't be here for at least a week. once they get here i'll try and run the disks through eSATA to the RAID Controller. If that doesn't work then i guess i'll return the Controller Card under warranty (3 year warranty on this on thankfully...) and just use those "port multipliers" off the original Apple SATA ports...