I've had my server running for over a year without any issues and then a few weeks ago after I restarted it and when I tried to start the array it would not work.  After I hit start it says it's "Starting..." but when I hit refresh it takes me back and says "Stopped. Configuration valid."  Even if I leave it alone for a few hours before I hit refresh it never makes any progress in starting up.  I upgraded to v4.7 but that didn't make any difference.  Any ideas on why this is happening?

see here

Sorry about that, here is the syslog. 

syslog.txt

Disk 4 (hdd, WD20EARS with serial ending in 218) is having serious problems, and causing your issues.  But before we write it off, I would shut down and make sure the cabling to it is tight, nothing slipped partially off, and connectors look good on both ends of the SATA and power cables to Disk 4.  The system knows Disk 4 is there, and can identify it, but not much more, and that is holding everything else up.  See if you can determine if it is spinning too.

 

You have another minor issue, which is complicating it some, the SATA support in your BIOS settings is now set to IDE emulation mode.  When you next reboot, go into the BIOS settings, locate the SATA configuration, and select a native SATA mode, preferably AHCI, anything but an IDE emulation mode.  One of the bad things about IDE handling is that it treats disks in pairs per channel, and if something goes wrong with one drive on a channel, it may cause trouble for both drives.  In your case, because of the trouble with Disk 4, the kernel turned off DMA use for both Disk 4 and Disk 5, which will result in very slow reads and writes to Disk 5.  Turning on a native SATA mode like AHCI will cause each drive to be independent of the others.  Disk 5 will be full speed.

 

If no success after checking the Disk 4 cabling and connectors, then Disk 4 is toast.  Remove it, replace it, and rebuild Disk 4.