Hi all,

I have been running a server with Fedora Core 4 and later FC5 on it for 8 weeks. Everything works excellently except that once in while a maxtor SATA Maxline drive disappears from its RAID-5 array on a 3ware controller. Frequency of failure: 56 days for each drive on average. Since I've got 8 drives, I loose one drive randomly on average per week.

If I hot reboot the server, the drive remains inaccessible. If I hot remove the SATA drive and replug it in, the drive is again recognized and ready for duty for its 56 days of operation (statistically)

I have already found 2 compagnons in misfortune that have fairly similar hardware, and the same odd failure rate.

I'm now looking for someone's success story with all these hardware running linux on i386 or x86_64 platform:
+ some recent Supermicro server with SATA hot-swap chassis
+ 2 or more Maxtor Maxline III drives or Diamondmax10 drives (models 6VxxxF0 or 7VxxxF0 only please).
+ a 3ware 9550sx raid controller card

So far I haven't been able to find anyone who is running such a combination without problems. The problems only occur after an uptime of about one to two weeks, so before concluding the problem doesn't occur, you should have an uptime of at least (56/number_of_drives)*2 days.

Thanks.