Dave Watkins wrote:
NO SATA cage (I've seen them do interesting things in the past too))
Strongly seconded. When I built my current home server, I bought a pair of 3-disk SATA cages from Startech. With the drives plugged directly into the LSI Megaraid controller, I was able to load it *hard* with no trouble for hours on end [1]. (Copying data across the network from my desktop, then duplicating it in horrible ugly trees of directories IIRC - some of the other suggestions also sound familiar.)
With the drives in the Startech cages, within 5 minutes I saw a disk reported as "failed" by the RAID card, and within about 20 minutes all *six* drives were reported as failed.
I shipped those cages back, and ordered another brand (don't recall which one offhand). Those have been working fine for more than a year now.
-kgd [1] Well, aside from the disks hitting 50C+. :(