I have an ESXi server that has recently experienced drive failures on disk 3 in span 1. This is a 4 x 1TB RAID 10 array and it has worked flawlessly for many years.
After replacing the failed drive, the system always rebuilt the disk and put it back online. This has happened too many times now (always same drive) and I figured it was a bad port on the PERC 6/i controller.
The last drive that showed failed could not be rebuilt. It kept coming back as failed. I decided to move the cable to the other port so the drives now show as 04 thru 07 instead of 00 thru 03. When this was done, the drive that showed as failed, now rebuilt as expected. I figured this was likely a bad port on the controller chipset and it may be time to source a new controller in case this one goes south.
Prior to rebuilding the drive, I updated the controller software and it shows as:
PERC 6/i
Package: 6.3.3.0002
FW Version: 1.22.52-1909
BIOS Version: 2.04.00
This ran fine for about a week and then it failed hard. ESXi showed the entire disk as failed instead of degraded status with a single drive failure.
Upon reboot, entering Ctrl-R, the BIOS Config Utility now shows both drives in span 0 as online and drive 06 in span 1 as online with nothing showing for drive 07 aside from a "Missing".
I can't seem to perform any operations on that Missing drive and need some assistance to determine how to recover from this. This is a new drive and I have never seen a "Missing" status before.
Do I need to purchase a new PERC 6/i?
Thanks,
Scott