CompuServe Messages

Gus: I've had a total of 3 Micropolis SCSI drives go belly up in my server — one (a 4Gb model 3243) in April and two (a brand new 3243 that I installed in April and a 2217 that's about a year and a half old) just a couple weeks ago. All made horrendous noise that could be heard clear across the office. The controller is an Adapptec 2742T (twin channel) EISA adapter. I beleive failures have occurred on both channels. With the first failure, Netware (3.12) deactivated the drive due to failures reading or writing or something. After shutting down the server and blowing a fan on the thing for a couple hours, I was able to get the drive back up (still screaming) and get a new backup run (so as not to lose the 3/4 day's activities). The second failure, was much the same, but I had just removed the bad new 4Gb drive and replaced it, and started it formatting whilst I went home to eat. I came back, and noticed on the tracker screen that a bunch of blocks were being re-directed to the hot-fix zone on one of the other drives (which was making a bit of noise, but I didn't think it sounded serious). I dismounted the drive and tried running VREPAIR, which failed (I don't remember exactly why). I took the whole thing down, cooled it, and tried bring it back up — but it wouldn't even boot (this last drive held the DOS partition and the SYS volume, of course. The server is on an APC Smart-UPS 600, so I don't think power is the problem (unless it's a faulty power supply), and so either it's heat, just rotten luck w/ less-than-average-quality drives, or the controller. I'm hoping it's heat, as the steps I've taken have been to try and eliminate that. I guess if I have more problems, I'll have to look at the other things. Any comments? Dave