I have a Dell PowerVault 220S connected to a Perc 4/DC in a PE2850. It is populated with (14) 73GB 10K U320 matching Seagate drives The Perc 4/DC controls only the external PV220, the interal RAID is running on the built-in Perc 4/e.
My problems lately with the PowerVault have been numerous.... Random single drive failures, random multiple (simultaneous) drive failures, etc. etc.
I will say that much of that is happening during high I/O operations (i.e. rebuild the array, then restore from a backup). I have removed each and every drive from the PV220 and performed a long test on the drive using the Seagate Enterprise Drive Tools. All drives pass without failure. I have replaced the Perc 4/DC with a new one... I have replaced the EMM cards, as well as the U320 interfaces in the PV..... Today, I re-inititialized the array from scratch, adding 13 drives to a RAID-5 array and using one drive as a dedicated hot spare. The array was built and functioning properly... I formatted it (running windows 2008) and the virtual disk was online. Dell OMSA showed a nice big green check mark on the storage tab and life was good.... Suddenly (and for no apparent reason) when I checked it this morning (via OMSA) there are red 'X' failures on the EMMS, Fans, Virtual Disk, every single part of the PV220 with the exception of the physical discs, which show they are working just fine.
The PV220 is connected via a double shielded, VHDCI cable running from the Perc external port to the PV220S. The PV220S is connected to the rackmounted APC 3000VA UPS system.
I have $200 external network Maxtor drives that are working better than this.
