Help. my AJ736A drives are dropping like flies

[DHerrick]

Hi Everyone:

     All I did was move an MSA2212fc dual controller fiber channel raid shelf with 12, AJ736A, 15k rpm, 300 Gb,

SAS, 3 1/4" enterprise hard drives from one 42U rack to another.  I also moved one BL680c G5 server from

one c3000 blade enclosure to another in the same rack as the MSA.  Then, I moved the AJ820A SAN switch

and plugged everything in and booted.  Only other change was I switched from RAID 5 to RAID 6.  The moves

were uneventful.  Nothing was bumped or dropped. 

 I created one large virtual drive and carved it up into 3 equal volumes.  Before the move things were fine.

Things were fine for a week or so after the move.  Now I'm getting orange LED lights on a few of the hard

drives.  It started out with 2 bad drives.  I replaced them.

Thinking it might be firmware/drivers, I upgraded the MSA2212fc, the AJ820A SAN switch and the P700M SAS

mezzanine HBA in the blade server to current and searched to see if there was a firmware update for the hard

drives.   Didn't find any updates for the drives.

Things were quiet again, but when I came in Monday there was another drive with an orange  LED on.  On

Tuesday there was another.  When I logged into the RAID controller it appears the 2 drives no longer exist.  Of

course we have no hardware support  and the drives are only warrantied for 3 years.  Right now, they're nearly

5 years old.

I've been searching around and this situation isn't discussed anywhere.  No mention of the meaning of orange

LEDs on these drives.  Can they be recovered with a low level reformat?  "New" replacement drives, if you can

fine them, cost between $400 and $500 each.  It's killing us.  Oh, by the way, the operating system is Windows

2008 R2 Enterprise at SP1

Any ideas?

Dennis Herrick

Dennis.Herrick@kla-tencor.com

Dennis_Herrick@hotmail.com