I know of a 4-port sata card that when it has certain issues it seems to affect all 4 ports, and required a reboot to fix. The card I had was an AHCI card with a 4port SATA x pci-e-x2 card, and things like smart commands running against it made it much more unreliable, but even without the smart commands running against it, it was not completely stable and would act up say 1x a month or so. If the 4-port card he has is not one of the near-enterprise grade cards then I would suspect that as I attempted to use several non-enterprise grade sata cards and finally gave up and obtained a used-enterprise grade SAS card. On Tue, Feb 19, 2019 at 10:10 AM Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk <roy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > Hi all, > > > > My friend is running a Debian 8 server with 48TB raid5 array running > > fine since 2016, but suddenly it failed last night around 9PM, > > reporting four drives missing. See below all devices details. > > I'm suspecting his disk controller with four SATA ports failed, as the > > failed drives were attached on it. So, I believe these four missing > > devices (sdk,sdl,sdm and sdn) are in good shape. > > However they got out of sync with the array. I'm wondering how the > > array got out of sync when it was not able to access these devices ? > > Can we recover the array from this failure? > > Possibly, as mentioned by Mikael, but there are good chances for corruption. Also, keep in mind that 13 drives in a RAID-5 and no spare isn't what I'd recommend - better use RAID-6 *and* a spare. It wouldn't have helped much here, but still, better keep redundancy high. > > PS: I would check cables and clean connectors with isopropanol and a clean brush to sort out connection issues. Four drives dropping out at the same time is usually just a bad cable/connection. Also - setup something like Zabbix to monitor the system so that you can get an alert once something like this happens again. > > roy > -- > Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk > (+47) 98013356 > http://blogg.karlsbakk.net/ > GPG Public key: http://karlsbakk.net/roysigurdkarlsbakk.pubkey.txt > -- > Hið góða skaltu í stein höggva, hið illa í snjó rita.
