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I've got a new server that I'm trying to install a RAID6 config on with a PERC 6i controller and 6 cabled drives.

I installed the card, battery and cabled the drives and all looked fine. I installed VMWare ESXi and everything appeared to be fine when I left for the night. I came back the next day to find a "FAILED" drive in the vSphere configuration utility for drive 1. I rebooted the server, entered the PERC utility to find drive 2 re-building. Since then it's been a really weird time of drives rebuilding themselves, going offline and "failing".

There have been times where the PERC utility said a drive was missing but vSphere said the drive was "Unconfigured Good". I'm a bit of a newbie with PERC (and RAID set ups in general) but I'm curious if anyone can shed some light on my problem. It's a bit hard to be confident in my new server when I'm getting hard drive errors right out of the box.

Can anyone shed some light on what my issue might be?

EDIT

  • The drives were all purchased from Dell at the same time (6 x 2TB)
  • There is nothing currently installed on the server and it is not in production so if I have to start from scratch, I have no issues with that
DKNUCKLES
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2 Answers2

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Problem was the hard drives. Contacted Dell and got 3 of them replaced.

Thank you for the input.

DKNUCKLES
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  • We had similar problem some time ago. Our solution was to upgrade drive's firmware. This might be the option if you'll face such problem again and don't want to spend time on getting replacement. – rvs Mar 22 '11 at 14:24
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This sounds like a faulty RAID card. I would re-seat the card first. If the problems persist I would contact Dell for a replacement card.

Mike
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