This is more in regards to your last paragraph. Where are you storing your
hard drives? What type of environment are they subjected to?

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 2:25 PM, Joe Fleming <joe@selectitaly.com> wrote:

>  Hey all, I have a Debian box that was acting as a 4 drive RAID-5 mdadm
> softraid server. I heard one of the drives making strange noises but mdstat
> reported no problems with any of the drives. I decided to copy the data off
> the array so I had a backup before I tried to figure out which drive it was.
> Unfortunately, in the middle of copying said data, 2 of the drives dropped
> out at the same time. Since RAID-5 is only tolerant to one failure at a
> time, basically the whole array is hosed now. I've had drives drop out on me
> before, but never 2 at once. Sigh.
>
> I tried to Google a little about dealing with multi-drive failures with
> mdadm, but I couldn't find much in my initial looking. I'm going to keep
> digging, but I thought I'd post a question to the group and see what
> happens. So, is there a way to tell mdadm to "unmark" one of the 2 drives as
> failed and try to bring up the array again WITHOUT rebuilding it? I really
> don't think both of the drives failed on me simultaneously and I'd like to
> try to return 1 of the 2 to the array and test my theory. If I can get the
> array back up, I can either keep trying to copy data off it or add a new
> replacement and try to rebuild. I'm pretty novice with mdadm thought I don't
> see an option that will let me do what I want. Can anyone offer me some
> advice or point me in the right direction..... or am I just SOL?
>
> As a side note, why can't hard drive manufacturers make drives that last
> anymore? I've had like 5 drives fail on me in the last year... WD, Seagate,
> Hitachi, they all suck equally! I can't find any that last for any
> reasonable amount of time, and all the warranties leave you with reman'd
> drives which fail even more rapidly, some even show up DOA. Plus, I'm not
> sending my unencrypted data off to some random place! Sorry for venting,
> just a little ticked off at all of this. Thanks in advance for any help.
>
> -Joe
>
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