On 05/01 09:45 , Les Mikesell wrote:
> Things like that aren't as unusual as you might think.  What often happens is 
> that unused parts of some of the disks go bad and aren't noticed immediately 
> - 
> then when a used area on one does have a problem it tries to rebuild on a hot 
> spare but in the process of building parity across all the sectors it hits 
> the 
> bad spots on the other drives.  Or, if it is really a controller problem it 
> can 
> affect several disks at once.

Other things that cause multiple near-simultaneous failures are:

- Environmental causes. If the case gets too hot; it can cook several
  drives.
- Vibration. Bearing goes bad on one drive, and the resultant vibration
  causes cascading failures.
- Human intervention. Drive goes bad, you crack the case and wiggle a drive
  out. This disturbs the connections on other drives enough that they die
  too. Several storage manufacturers (IBM & Xiotech come to mind) are
  proposing that dead drives should simply be abandoned in place and new
  disk packs added on to the array when necessary.

-- 
Carl Soderstrom
Systems Administrator
Real-Time Enterprises
www.real-time.com

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