Usually, when a harddisk fail on the RAID 5 configuration, the system should not be affected at all right?
My experience is that whenever there is a dying harddisk, the system will crash and I can't even boot up unless I remove the failed drive. Is this due to the RAID controller buggy firmware or the physical drive is consuming too much power that the motherboard cannot handle?
My server is Dell R710 and the RAID controller is MegaRAID SAS version 12.3.0-0032 and I found this: http://virtuallybright.com/2013/01/31/esxi-5-1-megaraid-sas-alert/