file server reboots PERC 5 raid controller

Guys one of our home file servers is running a Dell Perc 5i we have two raid five arrays. This server is used to store mainly media the first raid 5 is made up of 5 Samsung 2TB drives the second raid 5 is made up of 3 WD 2TB Red drives.We run windows server 2012 as the operating system with iscsi, smb, and nfs on the box. We use NFS to store our vm images and iscsi is connected to windows media center so that we can use dvr functions. Since I added the Red drives we have noticed some strange behavior. For example, the server reboots itself this has happened at least two times. The Perc 5i has eight connections so I have 4 Samsung's connected to the first connector and one Samsung connected to a port on the second connector. That leaves me with 3 connectors where I have the Red drives hooked up at. The only difference with the Reds are that they are sata 6 but since the Perc can only do sata 3 than the Reds run at sata 3 speeds. Also the Perc's log states that "connector id 0 is not certified". Tonight when the reboot happened we were recording 2 tv shows on the red drives and we were coping 2 dvd's over to the Samsung array. Everything was running smooth until I started the dvd file copy. So if anyone has any info on this please let me know.

Some drives just don't play well with some RAID cards.

Sounds like you may have a failing drive. Perc 5's tend to be very unstable and performance tanks when a drive is going south.

I did not see any drive time outs in the log. Also if I copy to both virtual disk on the perc 5i array at the same time the server will crash and reboot. For example, I copied data to two network shares one on the Samsung disk group and the other on the WD group.

I did more testing this morning I think this has something to do with the raid controller policy. The controller has three settings write through, write back with BBU, and always write back. If I change the each virtual disk group to use write through everything works fine however if I'm using the other two settings the server will lock up and reboot. I am starting to wonder if this is a bad battery on the raid controller.