MegaRAID i4 Makes Me Stabby

It's official. The MegaRAID i4 is a true Pain In The Ass.

Last night I upgraded the firmware in the hope that it would solve my drive rebuilding issues.

No such luck.

So I swapped in another 80GB drive and started the rebuild again. Then I went to bed.

When I awoke this morning and checked the status, I was surprised to find that it had failed again. (Insert sarcasm tags here.)

Okay. So I went to LSI Logics support page and downloaded the manual for the card. Maybe I'm doing the rebuild wrong?

The manual says (paraphrased):

1. Replace the drive.
   
2. Select the drive and then select 'Rebuild' from the menu
   

Sounds suspiciously like what I have been doing.

So I searched the LSI Logic Knowledge base for "megaraid i4 rebuild fails" and got 9 hits. The only one that seems really applicable is this one:

The newly installed hard drive does not have the same size/capacity in Megabytes as the other drives in the array. There is an option in the DACCF configuration utilty that will display the size of the hard drive as reported to the Mylex controller. In some cases drives from the same manufacturer, even with the same nominal capacity, can have slight differences in size. Get the hard drive with the same size and then rebuild the hard drive. It's best to use an identical replacement (same brand/model/firmware revision) to replace failed drives.

So, in essence, I'm screwed.

The likelihood of finding another WD80 drive with the exact same firmware and sizing parameters as the one that I originally build the array with is NIL.

So there are a couple of options here, only one of which is really feasible at this point:

1. Install the WD80 drive that I think is good and recreate the RAID - losing all the data and OS already installed - and starting over. This is the only feasable option, as I don't have any data on this filer yet that is not copied elsewhere and it's cost is $0. It's feasible, but not painless.
   
2. Buy 5 new, hopefully matched, 120GB drives. Build a RAID 5 array out of 4 of them with one as a hot spare. This would be the correct way to do this, but it costs $$ and I don't have any for this type of stuff. (Unless I won the lottery last night, lemme check - nope, no such luck.)
   

Soooo... In addition to possibly moving my server around this weekend, I may end up rebuilding my Openfiler box.

Some days I hate computers, other days, I REALLY hate computers. Guess that's why I'm a computer professional.

BTW, the title to this post was stolen from FreeBSDGirl.