It seems the situation has not improved.
The 3Ware card died. I am fairly certain I killed it. It wasn’t intentional. I have traced it back, as far as I can tell, to a faulty molex connector on the proprietary Dell PSU. I have not before used all the connectors, so it had gone unnoticed for a year. If I gently tap, touch, or in anyway make contact with the cable in question, the hard drive attached to it immediately and violently resets. You can tell because you get the classic drive ’spin-up’ noise immediately.
I tried another connector and jiggled it to death and the drive refused to reset. So, I am currently operating under the assumption that 1) the molex is bad, not the drive, 2) the PSU can handle the load I was placing on it, and 3) the drive violently resetting as the result of a power event of this time somehow physically damaged the 3Ware ATA RAID card.
The card itself does not POST in multiple machines in different PCI slots on each test machine. The main indicator LED comes on red, which I intrepret to mean “dead”.
At this point I have a problem. I don’t have any spare 3Ware cards with at least four ports. The cheapest new 3Ware card is $250, which is out of my league presently. I can get an 8 port card that claims UDMA100 from a vendor that sells old hardware, but they have not yet returned my email asking confirmation that it is indeed a 6800 and not an older, 5800. The 5800 only does UDMA33, though, so unless their listing is wrong, it is a 6800. It would also resolve my problem.
In the meantime /home is offline, and as such I don’t have access to my mail over IMAP, which is very annoying.
I’m debating whether I want to sacrafice a goat to the hard disk gods and borrow one of my RAID 1+0 member drives and run it off the on-board ATA chipset in JBOD. I can restore a lot, but not all, of my files. My array was around 80% full and an individual 120GB drive is around 60GB too small. I almost went to Best^H^H^H^Worst Buy to pickup a 200GB, but the one with rebates is sold out until Tuesday and that promotion ends today. See what happens when you don’t spend money needlessly on hot deals just because you can?
I’ll probably settle for symlinking /home into /usr on my OS drive and restoring my home directory with all my Maildir and running that. At least then I’ll have access to my email again while I decide how best to resolve this. I don’t want to rush into buying a new 3Ware card before I determine precisely why the existing one failed. If my Dell P3 system is somehow compromised, I don’t want to install new cards into its mainboard and waste more money and time. I don’t really want to replace the system, either, since I will then need a new chip, RAM, HSF, and CPU. Costly.
Now, it’s time to play with the molex connectors again just to be sure only that one specific connector is broken and there is not a more sinister problem.