"Bryan J. Smith" wrote:
Had you used the 3Ware's intelligent hardware RAID, it would have hidden the drive disconnect from the system. You'd see a log entry on the failure, and that the array was in a "downgraded" state.
Instead, you're using software RAID, and it's up to the kernel to not panic on itself because a disk is no longer available. The problem isn't the 3Ware controller, it's the software RAID logic in the kernel.
<smile>As much as I hate to agree with Bryan </smile>, this has been our experience also. We have many TB of disk running with 3ware controllers. We used to use software RAID, because at that time we found 3ware's tools to notify us of disk/array problems unusable. During that time, we could always tell when a disk failed, because we would have a crashed server. The data would always be there after we rebooted, but a reboot was necessary. A few years ago we migrated everything to 3ware hardware RAID, and now we rely on our alert system, instead of our users, to tell us when a drive fails.
Dave Thompson The University of Wisconsin - Madison