On Mon, 2007-10-29 at 13:22 -0400, Doug Ledford wrote:

OK, these you don't get to count.  If you run raid over USB...well...you
get what you get.  IDE never really was a proper server interface, and
SATA is much better, but USB was never anything other than a means to
connect simple devices without having to put a card in your PC, it was
never intended to be a raid transport.

I still count them ;-) I guess I just would of hoped for software raid
to really don't care about the lower layers.

quoted

* Internal serverworks PATA controller on a netengine server. The
  server if off waiting to get picked up, so I can't get the important
  details.

1 PATA failure.

I was surprised on this one, I did have good luck with with PATA in
the past. The kernel is whatever came standard in Fedora Core 2

quoted

* Supermicro MB with ICH5/ICH5R controller and 2 RAID5 arrays of 3 
  disks each. (only one drive on one array went bad)

* VIA VT6420 built into the MB with RAID1 across 2 SATA drives.

* And the most complex is this week's server with 4 PCI/PCI-X cards.
  But the one that hanged the server was a 4 disk RAID5 array on a
  RocketRAID1540 card.

And 3 SATA failures, right?  I'm assuming the Supermicro is SATA or else
it has more PATA ports than I've ever seen.

Was the RocketRAID card in hardware or software raid mode?  It sounds
like it could be a combination of both, something like hardware on the
card, and software across the different cards or something like that.

What kernels were these under?

Yes, these 3 were all SATA. The kernels (in the same order as above) 
are:

* 2.4.21-4.ELsmp #1 (Basically RHEL v3)
* 2.6.18-4-686 #1 SMP on a Fedora Core release 2
* 2.6.17.13 (compiled from vanilla sources)

The RocketRAID was configured for all drives as legacy/normal and
software RAID5 across all drives. I wasn't using hardware raid on
the last described system when it crashed.

Alberto