[X4U] Mac mini server drive failure

[Joe Sporleder]

On Jun 22, 2010, at 10:59 AM, Joe Sporleder wrote:

> I have a Mac mini server (previous generation) with the internal hard drives setup in a mirror RAID. While doing my normal Monday night backup routine, Disk Utility was telling me that the RAID had degraded, and clicking on more detailed kept showing me that the drive in the "upper" bay had failed as part of the RAID set. 2 attempts at rebuilding the set failed, as well as erasing everything, creating the mirrored RAID from scratch and restoring from backup, still resulted in a failed RAID. 
> 
> This tells me that the Hitachi drive in the "upper" bay has bit the bucket. Both drives are 5400 RPM, 500GB. I have a couple of spare Seagate Momentus 500GB drives running at 7200 RPM. Any problem with replacing the bad one with a 7200 RPM drive, or do both need to be the same speed of drive? Or, should I pull the good Hitachi drive too, and replace both with the Seagates?
> 
> Joe


Hmmmm . . . I've replaced the Hitachi drive in the "upper" bay that Disk Utility is telling has failed for the mirrored RAID set, with a Seagate Momentus 500GB 7200 RPM drive, and now Disk Utility is telling me that the Seagate has failed in the mirrored set. I completely erased both internal drives (the Hitachi that I thought was still OK) and the new Seagate I swapped in, built a brand new mirrored RAID set, and then used Disk Utility to restore from a cloned backup. It appears that whatever drive I put in the "upper" bay in the Mac mini is failing. Actually, I think the drives are OK, its something with the upper bay, because I reformatted the Hitachi I thought was bad in an external enclosure and just copied several gigabytes worth of movies from my MacBook and it worked fine. 

I'm wondering if I need to take it back to the dealer I bought it from and setup a temporary server in its absence. It still has 6 months warranty left on the 1st year. We recently had some very severe thunderstorms and I'm wondering if a surge didn't do something to the drive circuitry. The server and our network routers are all together and protected with an APC UPS - so I would think that with the extra surge protection and battery backup, it'd be fairly well protected. 

Joe