A few months ago I had an enormous amount of grief trying to understand why a RAID array in a new server kept getting corrupted and suddenly changing configuration. After a lot of despair and head scratching it turned out to be the SATA cables. This was a rack server from Asus with a SATA backplane. The cables, made by Foxconn, came pre-installed. After I replaced the SATA cables with new ones, all problems were gone and the array is now rock solid. Many SATA cables on the market are pieces of junk either incapable of coping with the high frequencies involved in SATA 3Gb/s or 6Gb/s or their connector are made of bad quality plastics unable to keep the necessary pressure on the contacts. I had already found this problem with desktop machines, I simply wouldn't believe that such a class of hardware would exhibit it also. So, I would advise you to replace the SATA cables with good quality ones. As an additional information, I quote from the Caviar Black range datasheet: "Desktop / Consumer RAID Environments - WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are tested and recommended for use in consumer-type RAID applications (RAID-0 /RAID-1). - Business Critical RAID Environments – WD Caviar Black Hard Drives are not recommended for and are not warranted for use in RAID environments utilizing Enterprise HBAs and/or expanders and in multi-bay chassis, as they are not designed for, nor tested in, these specific types of RAID applications. For all Business Critical RAID applications, please consider WD’s Enterprise Hard Drives that are specifically designed with RAID-specific, time-limited error recovery (TLER), are tested extensively in 24x7 RAID applications, and include features like enhanced RAFF technology and thermal extended burn-in testing." _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos