Sonnet Raid D800 – have I set this right?

[Peter Dunphy]

…not sure to be honest! :o) But as long as the thing is working I’m happy!

Thanks for your continued help Jeremy. You never know, we might finally be reaching a natural end of this marathon of a thread! Well, at least there are plenty of valuable tidbits of info in this thread for any other D800 owners who might come across it.

Peter Dunphy

2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5

[Peter Dunphy]

I think I must have broken a mirror or walked under a ladder somewhere.

Another Seagate Firmware 06 drive has failed on me, so says my Atto warning messages. A different position/different drive from the ones I’d mentioned previously in this thread.

I’ve just now backed up my Raid contents twice onto other drives, have killed the Raid (in case there’s a problem with the Raid setup somehow) and am rebuilding it fresh using all the same Raid default settings (128k interleave, Prefetch 0 etc).

However, this time I’m reverting back to my Raid 5 with 7 drives and a hot spare sitting idle. Things usually happen in threes so I’m happy to suffer the slight loss of read/write speeds in favor of being able to sleep tonight.

I’m wondering if perhaps the Prefetch setting is something that might need to be specific for my troublesome Seagate drives? I’ve just written to Seagate asking for any info they may have about this. I’ll contact Sonnet also…just in case the default Prefetch is somehow causing the drives to fail. Let’s face it though, it really shouldn’t!

Otherwise, it’s looking like the Seagate drives are the problem…or maybe my D800 could be incorrectly flagging up faults in the Seagate drives. I hope the problem is just the Seagate drives – only slightly less hassle to replace!

Here I go again, packaging up another failed Seagate drive, having to pay the return shipping costs, happy days :o/

Peter Dunphy

Update: Seagate just informed me that they do not have a recommended setting for my Raid, but to go with the manufacturer’s recommendation. So, I’ll stick with the default D800 settings, namely with a Prefetch of 0.

2 x 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 8 GB 1066 MHz DDR3, ATI Radeon HD 4870, ATTO ExpressSAS R380, Sonnet D800 Raid 5

[Jeremy Garchow]

I suggest you return all those drives and get your money back. Spend the extra dough for Sonnet approved drives that you buy from Sonnet (not Amazon). My raid hasn’t failed me at all.

Jeremy