[jontz]

Hmmm..

You said that it won't let you add share1 to the raid set. That's normal. To add a drive as a hot spare, it has to be totally unconfigured, just as it is right after format. THEN you can set it as a hot spare. Right now it sounds like you are running in a 3 disk raid with 1 JBOD disk, which would be really odd since the 4100 doesn't support JBOD. Did you do any disk config after the snap formatted it? I'm just trying to get a complete picture of what is going on. Again, the drive can't have any shares on it when you set it as a hot spare, it has to be an unconfigured, formatted disk.

When I had a drive bite it, here is what I did:

- Pull old drive
- Put in new one
- Wait 10 mins for format
- Tell the snap it was a hot spare
- Snap immediately pulled it into the array after I set it as a hot spare
- Wait 6 hours for RAID rebuild
- Enjoy my rebuilt RAID

That was it. I am really thinking that you have some sort of motherboard problem. I know that the SMART warnings are kicked out from the Hard Drive, but a failing controller can case the drive to do weird things, which in turn will send a SMART message to the controller.

BTW, pulling the jumper off on a WD drive puts it in Single Master mode, so you did the right thing.

I'm still thinking about this whole problem, but it is late. I'll let you know my other hair brained thoughts tomorrow.