My adventures with the Norco disk system have continued throughout the day, and after some more tinkering and some software-aided intervention, our storage array for the editor seems to be back up and running.

Apple’s Disk Utility program failed to do any sort of repair work on the array.  After many repair attempts, all I could get were directory errors.  After browsing around for some Mac disk repair utilities, I landed on one that showed promise:  DiskWarriorby Alsoft.

I fired up DiskWarrior, pointed it to our now-unmounted disk array, and watched it go to work.  It identified the array and cleaned up the directory structure, various file attributes, and various other things, and in about 5 minutes the array was back online.  SWEET!  This was WELL worth the price tag (about $80).

Thinking things were back to normal, I went ahead and shut everything down so I could install a UPS in front of the Mac and the resurrected RAID box.  After plugging everything in, I turned on the Norco drives, powered the Mac up, and watched in utter astonishment….as the system failed to recognize five of the twelve installed drives.

At this point I was about at my limit with this RAID array.  Not really knowing what else to do, I went ahead and shut both the disks and the Mac completely down, and then restarted the RAID after about a minute.  I let the disk system run for about 2 minutes before powering up the Mac.  My thought on this was that if the backplane or anything else in the RAID box has to run a POST or anything, I’m going to give it plenty of time to do so before restarting the computer.

I pushed the power button on the Mac, and lo and behold, I heard many drives starting to spin up all at one time.  In a few seconds, all 12 drives had spun up, and the RAID seemed to be back on its feet.  A quick look through the Finder revealed that all of our stuff on the array appeared to be intact.

So is this over?  I really don’t know.  I really haven’t felt like testing to see if I can replicate the issue by starting the Mac “too soon” after the RAID array is powered up.  What I am going to do is exchange our eSATA controller card for one that has been tested and is more compatible with the unit.  If that clears things up, then I’ll feel more confident about marking this down as  a hardware issue.  At this point, it makes sense that 2 different chipsets wouldn’t play well together.  But at the same time, you’d think there would be more consistency to it.

Maybe the constant here is just sheer unreliability.  Time will tell.  Until then, I’ll be copying our FCP project files onto a safer hard drive.