Chronic problems [solved]

I've had quite a few problems over the past little while with my server. Now, I think I can say they're solved for now.

The problem boiled down to two simultaneous component failures in the long run, plus real drive failures occasionally. It was a dangerous mix, but I think I'll come out of it okay, just wiser.

1) The 4-pin molex to SATA power adaptor going to my parity drive. The problem was on the molex end of the adaptor. This was on the "dark side" of my Centurion 590 case, so it wasn't easily accessible, and indeed I'd forgotten that it was an adaptor at all. I guess it worked intermittently, but I've had way too many parity drives fail on me in recent months. I fixed the adaptor by pushing some of the pins in. Voila! A drive that was supposedly failed (and gave many errors upon writing to it) is suddenly deemed fine; data is rebuilding onto it. Unfortunately, I just spent $160 on a new PSU, but at least it's super efficient and has 12 SATA connectors so no more using adaptors! It'll arrive next week.

2) The flat eSATA cable on one of my Sans Digital 5-bay cases. I've posted about slow parity checks, rebuilds etc. a few times now. A couple of posts recommended that I check the cabling, but since this was an enclosure, the cabling to each drive wasn't accessible. The eSATA connections seemed secure enough.

I bought a rounded cable and installed it. Voila! Data rebuilding is going much faster, and more importantly, consistently, without constant resetting of the SATA connections. My unMenu last 6 lines of syslog are finally showing nothing more malicious than a single duplicated thumbnails file. Before it was writing to the log all the time regarding problems with the ata7 controller (the Sans Digital enclosure).

Thanks to JoeL and a multitude of others who've helped me; I'm especially thankful that unMENU exists! I'm sometimes rash and do things before asking about them. I even did a couple of initconfigs when I shouldn't have, but some judicious renaming of super.bak files (I think) got me back out of trouble. I always learn the consequences of what I'm doing, so that's a small mercy. And I've learned a few things about what to look for in syslogs.

Anyway, the lesson here is that sometimes more than one thing may be wrong when things aren't right, and can compound diagnosis and fixing.