HD failure?

[Wade Preston Shearer]

So, in addition to my issues with my external drive, my server went down last night for another reason. It had something to do with one of the drives (in RAID). It appears that the HD failed, but the strange thing is that it is back up and running now. The reason that I discovered something was wrong is because the server went down and then would not come back up. This was because it could not find any logical drives. Inside the RAID utility, it reiterated that there were no logical drives. My initial reaction was "oh, crap, they have both failed." We tried pulling one out at a time though and rebooting to narrow our conclusion, something that was a good idea. Turns out that only one of them was bad. This is where it gets weird though. It kind of seems like it might not have been a drive at all; I am wondering if it was the RAID controller. I say this because the point of RAID is so that one of the drives can fail and things will keep going. If one of the drives was still good then the controller should have still said that an array at least existed. I rebooted with the one good drive and everything came up hunky-dory. I rebooted a few other times checking and testing things and then had the idea to try putting the "bad" drive back in. Interestingly, when I did, the RAID picked it up and started "reconstituting" it. Now, it says that everything is peaches. I can't ignore that something bad happened though. What are people's impressions or thoughts? Sound like perhaps the controller just had a heart attack and perhaps there was never anything wrong with the drive at all? Perhaps the "bad" drive really did freak out but not to the point of failing and after having the RAID rebuild it, it's okay for another go? Is there a way to test if you controller is on the fritz? I think I would be wise to order a backup drive. Any other suggestions?

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