Yo-Yo Server

I haven’t posted in forever. It’s probably because the server has sustained about a 60% uptime since the last post. I tried putting in a large software RAID 5 sometime in January and have had issues ever since. It ran fine for a month or so and then the controller card I had the drives on started failing. So, I had issues trying to disable the RAID to keep from using the drives and the card. Then, I tried removing the card after it started hiccuping again. mdadm didn’t like that and wouldn’t let the server boot if it couldn’t see all the drives in some form. So, I yanked the card and put the drives on two IDE controllers and rebuilt the array. It’s had some issues but is a little more stable. If it fails again, I’m yanking the 5 drives, replacing the IDE controllers and putting in a 4-channel hardware RAID 5 controller. I’ll keep the 5th drive in the server as a cold spare. Hopefully it won’t come to that, but I’ll do it if I have to. I’m just tired of dealing with it.