Well, once again I’ve got a failed disk in my Linux software RAID array. That’s got to be the third one that’s been flagged as failed within the last 6 months – they’re Maxtor 160GB drives. The last one that failed had a comprehensive PowerMAX test run on it and it passed everything. PowerMAX is the DOS utility that you have to run in order to get a special diagnostic code so that you can RMA the drive if it’s still under warranty.

It could of course just be a problem with one of the two Promise PCI IDE controllers that are providing the IDE channels for the drives. It would explain why the last failure was actually fine.
I really must look into some kind of large capacity backup system for all the digital photos, video projects and programming stuff that we’ve got lying around on the machine. At the moment it looks like just having a pair of arrays that get synchronised daily/weekly/whenever would be the easiest option, it’ll just take a while to backup the data and might put more of a load on the drives/controllers thus causing even more failures! Tough choice.
Wonder if they’re anywhere near producing a 1TB drive – get a pair of those (to mirror) and that’d be all the disk space I’d ever need!