On Wednesday, February 02, 2011 08:04:43 pm Les Mikesell wrote: > I think there are ways that drives can fail that would make them not be detected > at all - and for an autodetected raid member in a system that has been rebooted, > not leave much evidence of where it was when it worked. If your slots are all > full you may still be able to figure it out but it might be a good idea to save > a copy of the listing when you know everything is working. I'll echo this advice. I guess I'm spoiled to my EMC arrays, which light a yellow LED on the DAE and on the individual drive, as well as telling you which backend bus, which enclosure, and which drive in that enclosure. And the EMC-custom firmware is paranoid about errors. But my personal box is a used SuperMicro dual Xeon I got at the depth of the recession in December 2009, and paid a song and half a dance for it. It had the six bay hotswap SCSI, and I replaced it with the six bay hotswap SATA, put in a used (and cheap) 3Ware 9500S controller, and have a RAID5 of four 250GB drives for the boot and root volumes, and an MD RAID1 pair of 750GB drives for /home. The Supermicro motherboard didn't have SATA ports, but I got a 64-bit PCI-X dual internal SATA/dual eSATA low-profile board with the low-profile bracket to fit the 2U case. Total cost <$500.