Server Shutdowns

[chris.thompson]

We have two servers running. The mainboard in them (I don't recall the exact model) is an Asus with a P45 north and ICH10R south bridge. In each we have 4x Seagate 7200.11 500GB hard drives (and yes the firmware is updated) in a Raid 10 on the integrated Intel raid.

We're having a couple problems with them, but they're most likely related. Disk reads and writes are pretty slow, I've run tests and the drive in my laptop has better performance. But the biggest concern is that doing large file copies renders them unusable until power is cycled. It doesn't happen every time, but occasionally (once or twice a week) we'll come in to work and nobody will have access. No video comes up on the monitor connected to it, and trying to remote desktop to it just hangs trying to connect. Cycling the power allows it to boot normally and function like it should (though it does always kick off an verify and repair scan by the Intel Matrix utility). The thing is, we do a backup of the VMs on the systems to the local array at night, and today when I was copying a VM to the array, the same thing happened.

I've done the "Long" test on all of the drives in Seatools, they don't seem to be the issue. And like I said, I've updated the firmware to the latest. I've read a lot of things about similar problems in Vista (concerning running RAID on Intel controllers), but all conversation on that seems to stop about 2 years ago. It seems likely to me that it's the controller, but I'm not really sure what I can try.

Any thoughts? Thanks!

Edited April 3, 2009 by chris.thompson

[rv31]

Buy and try a raid card is one option.

[nitroshift]

What does the Event Viewer say?