Were you doing the RAID using the card's drivers (BIOS softraid/fakeraid), or using regular software RAID?
It seems odd that the controller would drop drives like that, but I would never trust the "RAID" features of low-end interface cards ... they're barely competent at exposing the drives as bare block devices to the OS as it is.
I've had decent enough luck with the real hardware-RAID cards from Dell, but they are expensive and if I were building a new server today, given the price of CPU cores, I'm not sure it would be at all worth the cost and SPOF risk. I've never had a card fail but if it did, that would suck. Back in the SCSI/PentiumII era they were fairly nice though -- I have a PERC still running in a closet, doing RAID5 across 5 74GB SCSIs. Probably about time to pull the plug on it though ... those five drives probably burn through their replacement cost in electricity every few months.
It seems odd that the controller would drop drives like that, but I would never trust the "RAID" features of low-end interface cards ... they're barely competent at exposing the drives as bare block devices to the OS as it is.
I've had decent enough luck with the real hardware-RAID cards from Dell, but they are expensive and if I were building a new server today, given the price of CPU cores, I'm not sure it would be at all worth the cost and SPOF risk. I've never had a card fail but if it did, that would suck. Back in the SCSI/PentiumII era they were fairly nice though -- I have a PERC still running in a closet, doing RAID5 across 5 74GB SCSIs. Probably about time to pull the plug on it though ... those five drives probably burn through their replacement cost in electricity every few months.