I have been trying in vain to get the Open-E system running but I keep encountering problems with the RAID array.

First I set up a RAID5 with the demo disk and everything seemed fine, so I ordered Open-E iSCSI-R3 Enterprise. Since I have not been able to keep an array up and running. I have about 10 disks spread over 2 controllers, the on board controller taking care of 3 and an Adaptec 3805 taking care of the other 6.

I want a large array of RAID 6 or RAID 5 + 1 spare, I have tried both and after the building is complete or somewhere near the end the system goes batty, information isn't displayed properly and at least a few of the drives go into a failed state. I end up having to restart the system before things get working again.

The problem is every time I have restarted suddenly any of the redundancy is gone. In the RAID 6 after a reboot 2 of the drives go missing, attempting to re-add them (which is horribly time consuming) results in typically a fail at the end of the re-build with the drives going back into a failed state and often all the drives on the Adaptec controller being unavailable until after a reboot. The same thing appears to be happening with the RAID 5 as well, after it gets all locked up after the re-build I reboot and the spare and the redundancy are unavailable. I get log errors saying I/O errors with the drives on the Adaptec controller but nothing more specific then that. I don't think this is actually a controller issue as it has the latest firmware and we have used it in an opensolaris ZFS prior to this as well as on other systems with a S/W RAID Set up.

Any advice at this point would be helpful.