I'm using a mirrored RAID (the built-in software RAID in Disk Utility) in my Mac Pro running 10.5.4, which is dedicated primarily for housing my home folder. Over the past week or so, I've experienced 2 failures. The first time, it rebuilt itself after a reboot and seemed to function fine (The SMART status on the drive checked out, which seemed odd). I bought a replacement drive and swapped it out since I didn't feel safe with it.
Before I swapped the drive, I rebooted a few times after taking 1 drive out and then the other to try to make sure I knew for sure which drive it was since the failed drive was no longer highlighted in red, thus pointing me to the proper drive bay. While doing this, the RAID ended up with a corrupt filesystem and I had to reformat the drives and rebuild it altogether (likely from my doing all of that, but I had already copied the data to another drive for safekeeping, just in case something like that happened). However the drive that failed would not format, so I figured it had finally completely died.
I swapped that drive, rebuilt the RAID, and have been running for a couple days. This evening I got back and as usual hit a random key on the keyboard to wake my displays up (the computer itself doesn't go to sleep, but the LCDs do). But, it never responded. I tried for a minute or so and then finally held down the power button to manually shut it off and turn it back on. It came back up just fine, but out of curiosity I loaded up Disk Utility and saw that it was rebuilding the RAID yet again. The drive that failed seems to be the brand new drive that I just replaced the other one with.
What could be going on? Right now I'm really paranoid that the RAID could fail altogether and cause me to lose data created between when I made the backup and now. I use Time Machine but had unplugged the drive because I kept getting failed writes (I thought the Time Machine drive was going bad, but now I think it was due to the RAID drive failing)
Is there any sort of diagnostic test I can run that will test the integrity of the drive bays' connections? I have the disk around here somewhere that came with AppleCare, but have no idea what's on it.
I'm really dreading the possibility of having to unhook this thing and get it sent in for repair, because it's my primary computer that I also use to work on a day to day basis, and the RAID is using enterprise-class 1TB drives, so they're not exactly cheap to keep trying to replace (although I'm going to try RMAing the first one)
Before I swapped the drive, I rebooted a few times after taking 1 drive out and then the other to try to make sure I knew for sure which drive it was since the failed drive was no longer highlighted in red, thus pointing me to the proper drive bay. While doing this, the RAID ended up with a corrupt filesystem and I had to reformat the drives and rebuild it altogether (likely from my doing all of that, but I had already copied the data to another drive for safekeeping, just in case something like that happened). However the drive that failed would not format, so I figured it had finally completely died.
I swapped that drive, rebuilt the RAID, and have been running for a couple days. This evening I got back and as usual hit a random key on the keyboard to wake my displays up (the computer itself doesn't go to sleep, but the LCDs do). But, it never responded. I tried for a minute or so and then finally held down the power button to manually shut it off and turn it back on. It came back up just fine, but out of curiosity I loaded up Disk Utility and saw that it was rebuilding the RAID yet again. The drive that failed seems to be the brand new drive that I just replaced the other one with.
What could be going on? Right now I'm really paranoid that the RAID could fail altogether and cause me to lose data created between when I made the backup and now. I use Time Machine but had unplugged the drive because I kept getting failed writes (I thought the Time Machine drive was going bad, but now I think it was due to the RAID drive failing)
Is there any sort of diagnostic test I can run that will test the integrity of the drive bays' connections? I have the disk around here somewhere that came with AppleCare, but have no idea what's on it.
I'm really dreading the possibility of having to unhook this thing and get it sent in for repair, because it's my primary computer that I also use to work on a day to day basis, and the RAID is using enterprise-class 1TB drives, so they're not exactly cheap to keep trying to replace (although I'm going to try RMAing the first one)