HDD Down (And Up)

I have a QNAP TS-209 II running 2 x Seagate Baracuda 1.5TB in RAID 1 (mirrored).

One of the drives failed a few weeks back. As they are about 3 years old I thought I would not be able to find a matching drive. However, found a factory refurbished drive on ebay for a reasonable £100.

It is supposed to be possible to hot-swap a drive in the QNAP and for the RAID 1 to fully rebuild itsself. However, due to where my NAS is located I needed to power the NAS down in order to unplug it from the mains and the network before I could lift it out onto a bench to get good access to the front panel to allow drives to be swapped over.

Now I work in IT, and know that there are many factors that mean things don't always go to plan... or to feature set!

So it was with much trepidation that I opened up the NAS, removed the faulty drive and then slotted in the refurbed drive. Even more trepidation when I plugged it all back in and powered up the NAS. Within the usual couple of minutes the drive was visible again on the network, with file explorer much snappier than it had been in the past few weeks and all files present and correct.

All the indicator lights on the front of the NAS were matching with the sequence in the instruction book that says a RAID 1 config is being rebuilt. We wrote no further files, nor did I use the DS or the Squeezeboxes during this process. In fact, it was allowed to run overnight. I don't know when the RAID rebuild finished, or how long it took, but it was completed sometime in the 7 hour overnight window and that's with 800GB of data (single copy of data = 800GB).

All is now well again, and I can breathe once more.

As its inevitable that hard drives will fail, I went for the dual bay NAS approach, but I still had my doubts about what would happen in the event of a failure. On this occasion it was all good news. This has also cemented my faith in the QNAP NAS - I know many think they are a little on the expensive side, but with this experience I think that is inconsequential compared to the hassle I could've gone through due to hard drive failure.

So a good news IT story. Music was saved!

Amusing Blog From Another Viewpoint

Just been enjoying this blog - penned by an Audiophile's wife.  I'm pretty sure its not my wife, either that or many stories have been added or embelished for maximum effect...

Its a good read!

http://www.theaudiophileswife.com/