A DS1511+ disaster :(

[joe567890]

Hi All!

I have a DS1511+ (and a 5 disk DX510 expansion unit). I use 3TB Western Digital Green hard drives, and use the SHR raid configuration. One volume with 5 drives for the DS1511+ and another volume for the expansion unit.

Last night disk 4 in the DS1511+ crashed. I replaced the drive, and started the "repair". When I went to sleep, it was ~2% complete. This morning I woke up, and now Disk 4 and Disk 1 in the DS1511+ have crashed. I am bummed...

Is there a preferred method to try and retain as much of my data as possible? Am I SOL? Any help and insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!

 

[travisco_nabisco]

That sucks, but you should be ok just don't touch anything yet.

I had this almost exact problem happen to me. You will need to contact Synology's tech support. They will eventually, it took around a week in my case, have a rep remotely access the DS1511+ and will remount the RAID in degraded mode. Once they do that, back up everything to external devices and then wipe the DS1511+ and start over.

You may loose some data, but it should be minimal.

Hopefully you have good backups in case there has been any data corruption.

Best of luck.

 

[joe567890]

Thanks!
I think I have enough drives around to offload.
They still have not replied to me.
At least it is encouraging!

Do you think I can use the other volume (3 drives on my DX510)?
I would think so, but I'm paranoid now.

And thanks again for the response!

 

[stevech]

A reminder: RAID is not a backup.

 

[thiggins]

Do you think I can use the other volume (3 drives on my DX510)?
I would think so, but I'm paranoid now.

I would not touch anything until you hear from Synology.

 

[joe567890]

yes, I'm in waiting mode for them.
still radio silence

 

[thiggins]

If you didn't call them, do so.

Synology America Corp.
13343 NE Bel-Red Road
Bellevue, WA 98005
USA
+1 425 296 3177 - Support
+1 425 818 1587 - Other Inquiries
(Hours of operation: 9A-5P, M-F, GMT-8)

 

[joe567890]

ah... not email/support-ticket?
I'll call, thanks for the tip.

 

[stevech]

I called them once - got a quick answer from an actual geek in the US.

 

[joe567890]

Update which folks might find interesting.

They did respond via email, and it was within 48 hours. Not super-great, but in 2012 and the state of technology vendors, it really is not that bad.

So after an email exchange I turned my NAS back on and found I could still "read" from the crashed volume. So my offload copy is in progress (slowly....)

Of interest, The "new" Disk-4 remains invisible, I got two "I/O error" on Disk-1 overnight, and also a notice that Disk-2 had crashed (and a few "I/O error" notices).

It now seems probable to me that this is mostly a DiskStation-based event/problem. I think Disk-4 (the original, not the invisible/non-initialized Disk-4 in the NAS now) was clearly defective which was the compelling cause. But I do not think Disk-1, the new Disk-4, and now Disk-2 are defective/failed. We'll get more information after the offload when I do some SMART tests.

Do folks think my NAS unit is defective? Are there settings to mitigate the issues?

Thanks!

 

[stevech]

The scheme I decided to use is unconventional, but it's what experience tells me is best for home/SOHO...

Dual drive NAS.
Drive 1 is volume 1; drive 2 is volume 2.
No RAID.

Synology's time backup feature keeps volume 2 in synch with volume 1.
So a drive failure is protected by the opposite volume.
A file system corruption is limited to that volume- the other volume is a different file system. I think this is better for me anyway, than RAID1 or RAID5 where a file system corruption is RAID-wide.

And on occasion, volume 1 is copied out USB3 (or eSATA) to a portable drive that goes off-site.

I also use ($30) SecondCopy on my main PC - it watches really important folders on my PC (financial stuff) and copies to the NAS whenever there's a change, and stores on the NAS the last 4 versions of all files/folders.

 

[theoldwizard1]

It now seems probable to me that this is mostly a DiskStation-based event/problem. I think Disk-4 (the original, not the invisible/non-initialized Disk-4 in the NAS now) was clearly defective which was the compelling cause. But I do not think Disk-1, the new Disk-4, and now Disk-2 are defective/failed. We'll get more information after the offload when I do some SMART tests.

I concur. I would also like to know how recovery/rebuild went !

Even though Synology yells at you that RAID is not backup (30+ years in the business ... I know this !), they don't tell you how easy it is to use tar to back up your RAID set(s) to a JBOD (cheaper), the same NAS !

Some day I'll get around to writing that cron shell script to do this !