DL360 RAID controller keeps losing drives

[msurkan]

Does anyone have any ideas as to why a Proliant DL360 G6 RAID controller might lose drives periodically? Every 2 or 3 months one of my DL360s experiences a hiccup and fails to recognize 2 of the 7 ESATA drives that are in a RAID 5 configuration as a single volume.

I typically notice a problem because some of the virtual machines I run on the box start to fail (I am running VMware ESXi 5.1 on the box).

When I reboot the server I get a RAID controller error like this:

Replacement Drive(s) detected or previously failed drive(s) now appear to be operational.

Logical drive(s) disabled due to possible data loss.

Press F1 to continue with logical drive(s) disabled
Press F2 to accept data loss and continue

When I select F2 the drives are now visible again and everything is fine for the next few months until the next "hiccup". Of course, I do have to restore many of the VMs that have become trashed while the 2 drives were unavailable.

I have upgraded all firmware to the very latest versions. I find it hard to believe this happens just because I am using eSATA disks seeing as how they work just fine most of the time and even after the hard reboot.

Any suggestions as to what may be causing this? Could it be driver problems?

[TVVJ]

What is the model DL380 has the issue and what is the HP Smart Array controller used?

Regards,

Vijayasarathy

[msurkan]

My appologies. I just checked again and see that I made a mistake with the server model. It is a DL360 G6.