A little story of failed raid5 (3ware 8000 series)

[David Schwartz]

> A day ago at 11 am i have turn off the server,
> pull out the old driver, installed a new one, turned of the server
> and started rebuild in an hour from remote location via web interface.
> After about 5 minuted the machine became unresponsive. Tried rebooting
> - nothing. I went to the machine and fingure out, that rebuild failed (0%)
> and some data cannot be read because of bad sectors.

Why would you power cycle a RAID 5 array with a failed drive? That's like
the biggest no-no that there is. When you lose a drive on a RAID 5 array,
you are vulnerable until a replacement drive is configured and the array is
rebuilt. Any high risk operations during that time would be foolhardy.

> So, no raid5 or even raid 6 for me any more. Never!

Since RAID6 would have saved you from what presumably was a drive failure
before a rebuild could be done, it's hard to understand why you would say
this is a reason to avoid RAID 6. Perhaps you would do better to understand
your failure and avoid the causes of the failure rather than avoiding the
things you happened to be using at the time of the failure.

If you get food poisoning while wearing a blue shirt, the solution is not to
avoid blue shirts in the future.

DS