A week ago my Adaptec RAID 5 utility reported that a drive had failed and that the hot spare had been used to rebuild the array. The failed drive (a Seagate ST366706lw) was at address 1. I shut down system, replaced #1 with a new drive. System recognized the drive, but formatting failed. On Friday I got a new drive in place, system recognized drive, formatting was successful and I added it as a spare. On reboot I could see #1 listed correctly as a hot spare to the array.
Now the drive has failed again, having lasted only about 5 hours! These are new drives, and the array drives are all the same ones, and they have been reliable, up to now. My question: Could it be that the Adaptec 2100S is somehow destroying the drives? Would it help if I used another address? I just find it hard to believe that two new Seagate drives in a row, from different sources, would be bad.