I have a Dell T7500 with a PERC H710P connected to 4 3T drives in a RAID5 array. Also connected to the controller are 2 256G SSD drives, not configured in an array. A Linux server is installed on one of the SSD drives, and the RAID5 is where all my user data are stored.
The other day upon boot, the RAID BIOS reported errors
Drives 01 and 03 missing
Foreign config available
I loaded the foreign config, and the drives reappeared. On the next boot, I got
Drive 01 offline
Thinking the drive was bad, I replaced it with a new drive and rebuilt drive 01. When I next booted, the system came up OK, but a few reboots later I got
Drive 00 offline
Foreign config available
So I read in the Foreign config and forced 00 online.
After several reboots I then got
Drive 03 offline
Foreign config available
Read in foreign config. Force drive 03 online.
Now the system comes up OK. I have rebooted it many times.
Should I assume that my controller is bad?
Or said another way, is there any possibility that this kind of behavior can be caused by something other than the controller? For example, can the kernel driver muck up the driver configuration somehow?