hot swap SATA bay reliability/causing errors?

[FLECOM]

I am looking to see if anyone has had similar experiences as I have with hot-swap SATA bay/enclosures...

at work we had an array with a pair of KINGWIN KF-4000-BK 3.5" Internal hot swap rack raid-4 bay thingies

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817990004&cm_re=4_sata-_-17-990-004-_-Product

drives would mysteriously drop from the array, when they were plugged directly into the SATA cable they would just as mysteriously work fine again... we figured they were just crap and put them all directly wired...

so at home i purchased some NORCO SS-500's

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816133030

since everyone seems to have their giant arrays in a norco i figured i would be safe... well, after a month or two it started doing the same thing, randomly dropping drives from certain ports, replacing them with a known good drive would yield the same results (instability, claiming the drive had failed etc)... again, when directly attached, the drive was OK

so looking for alternitives I remembed supermicro, we use tons of their cases in our datacenter, they all have hot-swap SATA bays, so surely their standalone ones should be ok right?

so I found the Supermicro CSE-M35T on newegg

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?item=n82e16817121405

and the reviews are complaining about the exact same thing as the Norco and Kingwin!

whats going on here?

 

[Snoopdog]

I recently had an Athena / iStarUsa cage dropping drives out of my arrays. They were wd green drives but I had TLER turned on 7 seconds and had been running okay for a few months. One drive dropped, the hot spare kicked in and started rebuilding. While rebuilding it marked a drive bad, this was using a Perc 5i controller.

Looking at the board construction I was not impressed with the soldering job. I had ordered another hot swap cage the same week right before the drives started dropping out. The cage came in and the second port on the new cage would not see a drive no matter what I did. After removing the drive a few times trying to get it to work I smelled smoke. Yep, it burned up all 5 drives. Five wd6400aaks smoked, no longer spin up. I no longer have that warm fuzzy feeling about drive cages, so the two cages are in the attic waiting to go to the recyclers.

 

[drescherjm]

At work I have had no problems with athena power (and similar) units dropping out drives however I am using linux software raid 5/6 and it is not as sensitive to this as HW raid.