[blue68f100]

Some of those errors I have not seen before, making me wonder if it's not hardware related. Like you said it is very odd for all the drives to fail at the same time. I have seen drives fails with in months of each other. We did have a user through here a while back that had 2 drives fail in less than 2 weeks apart, before he got the replacement.

You do not want to fill a drive with data over 90%, it needs the 10% free for caching and temp files. The Guardian OS takes 10gig of the drives space for OS & temp/cache files.

Phoenix32 has done the most testing on these units. We have discovered that you must set the drive jumpers correctly for the IDE to handle a drive failure without breaking the array.

The cooling fan on my 4100 sounds like its trashing it self. Is your cooling fan running smoothly? I will be rewireing mine so it runs 24/7, no temp control.

I would also wager that Adaptec sends your referb units with Maxtor Drives. There only goal is to get it out of the warranty period. This is where SnapAppliance and Adaptec differ. Snap use to always used high quality drives, where Adaptec is to save a buck. They just want you to have a service contract. The 2200 (referb) I bought for a friend came with Maxtors and it did not make it through the initial raid1 build without failing. I Don't trust Maxtor's in anything. If you open one of the up you will find plastic where other mfg use steel. After that I decided to test all newly installed drives with Spinrite. Another thing we discovered (Phoenix32 and I) is that SpinRite found a lot of bad sectors and mapped them out, along with high rate of seek errors. I had one drive that used over 50% of it's reserved sectors, and high seek error count (seagate in my 4500). The other 3 drives were clean or just minor errors. Since MFG no longer test the media this can be expected. So it needs to be done on server drives, where seek times must be held to a minimum. You can't have the Smart tech doing this with consective bad sectors and seek times all over the place. Systems will complain. I now run Spinrite on any new install, I would prefer it to fail while I am testing it than in service. At least you will know which drives may present a problem. My new WD RE drives were clean as a whissle.

If you have a copy of Spinrite you may want to use it to check your drives. Since it runs at the controller level it will not damage or corrupt a raid5 system. It may correct the problem you are having. Spinrite also has a reconditioning feature to refreshes the surface. I generally use my spare pc's for this. It takes close to 22 hr to run on my 400gig drives.