help: SCSI RAID drives intermittent clicking/hanging

[xylem]

This has been an ongoing problem. Occasionally (maybe once per 30-45 mins of steady use), my drives will click, and the program I am running will stop responding, then about 3-4 seconds later, the drives will click again, at which time the program will resume functioning. I have never experienced this with IDE single or raid configs or single SCSI disks. To the best of my knowledge this affects all running programs. Here is the configuration: Adaptec 3200S RAID 0 with 2 drives (Cheetah 10k 36gb), cache set to write-back in bios.

Aside from this annoying problem it performs very well.

Any input on the cause and solution of this problem is appreciated.

 

[Woodie]

Very odd. In my experience, any clicking sound from a drive is a very good prognostic indicator that the drive will need replacement in the near future.

That said, Are the drives ever spinning down? Are they hot/over-heating? What about the controller--is that gettinig hot? (I actually put a heat-sink onto the main chip of one of my RAID controllers).

 

[AreEss64]

The clicking is your drives doing a full bus reset due usually to overheat. My recommendation is to use either IBM 10kRPM 1.6" drives (which run -far- cooler than Cheetahs - nearly 10C on average in my testing, and are much more reliable) or to get a 3 drive/2 bay drive fan cage from PC Power and Cooling over here. The other possible cause is driver issues or XP causing a SCSI bus reset, but in my experience the Cheetahs do that a LOT themselves when they're overheating. And those things run just too damn hot.

 

[xylem]

Ok guys, thanks for your replies. I have a lot of air circulation in my case, and a fan drawing air over the drives, but it definitely could be improved... makes sense that they would do it while under load too (more heat). I will see what I can do about cooling, and try to get some cooling on the 3200s cpu, and any other suggestions are appreciated.

 

[mastertech01]

You may also want to check that you have good power to the drives. Sharing power with fans and such can cause intermittent SCSI drive resets. I just had this problem today. Once I removed the hard drive cooler fan from the main drive power cable, the problem disappeared.