RAID 5 Multiple Hard-drives failure

[Timothy Alberts]

> So my questions having said all that, is there any thing else other than a 
> real hard-drive problem that would cause something like this ? 
> In other words, could the problem be in the controller, motherboard, etc other 
> than the hard drive itself that would cause hard-drives to fail like that ? 
> Or is it just Maxtor makes bad drives ? 
> Or is a consumer level hard-drive just cannot be used for this kind of work 

Reuben,

I am in a very similar situation.  I've had several hard drives fail on
me in the last few months.  I'm investigating this very problem.

I'm coming to the conclusion that Maxtor drives are poor quality,
they're meant for desktop use so they get shut off frequently and
accessed less frequently.  One of the people I'm working with to deal
with getting my server situation under control is Silicon Mechanics
(www.siliconmechanics.com).  They're telling me that Seagate and some of
Western Digital's lines are 'server quality' drives.  In particular, a
recent quote I got from them recommended nothing but Western Digital RE
series drives. 

Good luck with the problem, I feel your pain brother.

Tim A.