So, new drivers came out, I installed them, my RAID faulted, then rebuilding crashed, and now I'm just reinitializing the entire RAID and hoping that it doesn't report 'faulted' during initialization and require system restart over and over again as it did last night.
I installed the 64 bit flash firmware, and then noticed that my Lion kernel was at 32 bit, so I changed that and am now officially running 64bit kernel. I was not aware that Lion still ran 32 bit kernel.
ATTO said some people had problems with the firmware released in December. The new firmware is dated 1/24/12.
Hitachi has no idea how their drives report smart temperature. None. I'm not actually surprised about this. Big corporations are awesome.
Luis and Jon at ProAvio are awesome, as always. Thank you for helping me!!! Steven from ATTO has also been really good about directing me to potential issues. Hopefully their new firmware fixes all.
As a last resort I still have the old Highpoint RAID card laying around. If I get more faults on the current initializing (right now at 12% with no faults yet) I'm going to rebuild the RAID using that card to make sure it's not a bad drive (I've replaced three already, but I don't even know if they were really bad). If it weren't for the fact that ProAvio gets such excellent performance from the combo (Read/write is 1000 and the graph line is beautiful) I'd have run for the hills.
At this point it's entirely possible that I have a wonky R680. While hard drives are definitely in short supply, I just can't imagine that I'd get so many bad drives in a single delivery. After the next initialization and running the RAID Maintinance App from ATTO, if there are STILL issues, I'll take out each drive and put them inside a mac pro. At least that way I'll be able to officially rule out the drives as the culprit.
Here's a grab of the AJA speed test results I was getting. If I used the 16Gb test, sometimes it would just knock the RAID offline. Lame.
This is what Luis at ProAvio is getting with the same setup. Look at that gorgeous line!
Forgive the length of this, I'm merely trying to document as much as possible for other readers who encounter issues in the future. I'll continue documenting further developments.
