Advide for DIY RAID storage

Hello,

Please excuse the rather lengthy description. I run a RAID 5 (with mdadm) at home to store movies, videos, music, photos, laptop backups, and lots of other things. I'm currently running Fedora 17 x86_64 on an MSI Mobo with an i7 2600K, 16Gig RAM, a jMicron SATA II Controller card, and a Super Micro CSE-M35T-1B 5 HD Tray. Linux boots from a dedicated pair of 60G SATA III OCZ SSD's and there are 5 x 2TB WD drives, inside the Supermicro enclosure.

I've been having issues (multiple) for a cpl weeks where drives drop from the RAID (I use mdadm). When I check the HD using the WD fitness test the drive seems OK. So I bought a separate 3 TB drive and made a copy of everything in the array.

At this point I don't know whether the jMicron Controller (which seems kinda crappy - long story) or the Supermicro enclosure (which I had for 3+ years) are to blame. So I was wondering if anybody had any experience with those. I'm considering replacing the controller and/or moving to a better case like the Thermaltake Level 10 GT since it comes with it's own enclosure for 5 drives. A very important criteria for me is durability. The first version I build lasted me 8+ years (my RAID drives back then where 300G). I just build the current version in January (although the 2TB drives I have since 2009) and has been stable until 2 weeks ago.I would very much appreciate your advice.

Erasmo.

When you have drives that are not enterprise level drives specifically designed to RAIDed, things like this can start to happen.

I would suggest backing everything up and wiping your drives and recreating the raid.

If you are still having issues after that, I would start looking at a dedicated RAID card.