Originally Posted By: Sealeopard
Could be heat as well.

Last summer, I worked on a project where we used an HP blade chassis. When it arrived, the local admin unpacked it and assembled it. He fired it up, and it failed after running for a while. I dug through the trash and pulled out the documentation. Reading the quickstart guide, I found that if you install 4 of the six power supply / fan modules, you can't install 1,2,3,4 as he did, you need to install 1,3,4,6. I repositioned the power supplies, fan modules, and redistributed the blades, and the problem disappeared.

The point is - even minor misconfiguration in the blade chassis can cause problems across the blades themselves. It's possible that you received drives from a defective manufacturing lot, but my money would be on a bad or misconfigured cooling module, or a power supply that's impacting the +12v line in the chassis. Only the drives use 12v nowadays, and noise on that line can impact the rotational accuracy enough to trigger a drive "failure". With SMART drives, they report errors back to the controller that could be interpreted as a motor failure.

Glenn
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Actually I am a Rocket Scientist! \:D