Hard drives shutting themselves off in RAID mode

[Tom Wirschell <dm-devel@wirschell.nl>]

I'm trying to setup a poor man's RAID5 array that uses 11 200 GB Western
Digital harddisks. Two of them are the PATA Caviar SE 2000JB drives and
the other ten are SATA Caviar 2000JD drives.
Both PATA and 2 of the SATA drives are connected to the mainboard, an
ASUS PSCH-L with an Intel E7210+6300ESB chipset. The other drives were
previously connected to 2 Promise FastTrak S150 TX4's which I've since
replaced in favor of the 8-port SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 card in the
hopes of fixing the issue I'm having, but to no avail.

I want to create a RAID5 array of these drives. Unfortunately after a
varying amount of time of moderate use (though never more than 24 hours)
one of the drives not connected to the 6300ESB just out of the blue
shuts itself down, eventually followed by another at which point the
array is dead.

When the drive shuts down I can hear the familiar click from the drive
cutting its power, and after a bit the following gets logged:

ata9: commant timeout

when using the Promise controllers. The machine locks hard at this
point. With the SuperMicro card the machine remains usable, but the
drives are never to be heared from again. The following is logged:

ata14: no device found (phy stat 00000000)
sd 13:0:0:0: SCSI error: return code = 0x40000
end_request: I/O errorm dev sdi, sector 390716676
raid5: Disk failure on sdi2, disabling device.

Pretty much every time it's a different disk, and I'm unable to revive
that disk without a reboot.
I brought this issue to the attention of some WD support people who're
basically telling me that the RAID software is impatient. This being
desktop drives, they're not particularly fast (which I don't need them
to be) and not equally fast either, hovering between 20 and 30 MB/s
for writing. Haven't tried to measure reading yet.

When I mount the drives as separate partitions I can play with them to
my heart's content. As a test I filled up 5 drives, copied the data to
the other 5 drives (I'm using the 11th drive, a PATA one, for Linux
itself ATM) and vice versa. As I'm writing this I'm running Bonnie++ in
parallel on these partitions and so far everything's solid as a rock.

Besides the Promise controllers I've replaced the powersupply (500W
HuntKey to a 550W Antec TruePower II), all SATA data cables, all SATA
power cables...
I've tried striping instead of RAID5 but that didn't help either.
To the best of my ability I've ruled out hardware faults. The only
thing I can think of now is that the RAID5 module, for whatever reason,
is _telling_ the drive to shutdown, but I can't imagine that happening
without some serious logging going on.

Hopefully someone on this list can help me get this problem sorted?

When I was using the Promise controllers I was using version
2.6.11.12, and later 2.6.16.14 of the kernel. When I switched to the
SuperMicro card I had to upgrade to 2.6.17-rc5.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Kind regards,

Tom Wirschell