Cris,
I too got the same LSI Megaraid card--couple days ago too. Having similar issues. I figured I'd explore recovery scenarios before I have to use them for real in the future. I too had trouble getting the array to rebuild, even in Windows with Power Console Plus. The best it ever did was rebuild to 50% overnight and freeze at 50%. Other times it just failed, or went to about 28% and then started over. I even tried rebuilding just within the WebBIOS utility and that failed.

Oh, yeah, and to clarify, all I did was take one of the working drives, "fail" it, and then attempt to make it rebuild. Same drive that was just working, so that eliminates all those "sizing" issues and other random gotchas. No reason it shouldn't rebuild.

It is SLOOOOOOOOW rebuilding even when making progress. An hour to rebuild about 5% or so--I have brand new 300GB drives. I also tried adjusting the rebuild speed. I can handle it taking a half day to rebuild as long as it actually rebuilds to 100%. But 3 consecutive failures is not acceptable.

Is this the problem you were having?

For me at this point, I'm saying no to MegaRAID. I starting to think mlord is right. Software RAID may be the way to go. I've always been under the impression that a hardware solution was better, or at least easier. But I'm rethinking that opinion now. The i4 card was made before all the gigantic and faster 7200rpm drives, so I'm guessing that has something to do with it. I also don't like the lie in the product datasheet on LSI's site. It says auto-resume rebuild upon reboot. That does NOT happen, and if you search their knowledge base, it actually says that the card restarts the rebuild process FROM THE BEGINNING upon reboot. That is just a simple lie. I suppose the "hot swap" claim is probably also a lie at this point.

I'm curious what others think of this card or other similar cards. Should I just throw it in the garbage?