[Discuss] weird disk issues

[adler at stephenadler.com (Stephen Adler)]

Guys,

I'm not sure how appropriate this question is for this forum, but since
my problems are occurring on my linux system, I'm hoping someone can
help.

Recently I have had a rash of disk failures on my home server. One of
them was an SSD 120G drive, a Samsung EVO 840. Then a seagate drive.
The this which is puzzling me is that I have all my drives tied into
raid arrays of various sorts in order to protect myself from disk
failures. But the odd thing is that when I have my disk failures, it
affect more than one drive in the array knocking out the whole raid
array.

what I've had to do is boot up using a live fedora image and then issue
mdadm commands to restore the array. In one case, it was only one disk
which was bad in the array, even though 2 disk's were kicked out. I had
to reassemble the array to get it back up in degraded mode, after which
replacing the one drive got it back up. In another case, two SSD drives
went out, killing my raid 1 array (mirror mode). Again, mdadm'ing
getting it back, and only replacing one SSD drive got the system going.
Then again last night, my SSD raid 1 array kicked both drives out, but
I was able to reassemble it without replacing drives.

All this has occurred within one week! I've owned the system for like 7
years and never a glitch, until now.

So, is it really the drives? could it be my motherboard or SATA
controller on the motherboard is going bad? Bad power supply? Should I
consider replacing the motherboard? Or am I just having a bad raid
week?

thanks. Steve.