I just had two disks go down on me within 48 hours. I was using an Escalade 6800 IDE controller, with three drives set up in a RAID 5 configuration. I got a notice on Thursday afternoon that one went dead. I immediately did a backup, and swapped out the drive that night. I couldn't get the array to rebuild, however. After upgrading firmware and trying the rebuild a half-dozen or so times, I noticed that there were many errors on one of the other drives on the array. I couldn't fix these with chkdsk /f (that's all I had - anyone have suggestions for better software, I'm all ears!). Saturday morning the other drive finally died alltogether. I got some brand new drives, and still couldn't rebuild the array. Fortunately, I was able to fit all the data on one large drive and mirror it, so I only had one day of downtime during the week (let's hear it for good backups!)
Has anyone else had two drives die in such a short period? Anyone have any tips on how I could set up better? Any horror stories?