Post by igraham on Apr 17, 2007 2:39:16 GMT 7
My new Thecus N5200BR has just gone down with all my data. Pfftt - gone. The problem, as it turns out, is that I filled it with Western Digital WD2500YS drives which have a bug that causes them to drop out occasionally. In my case I was using RAID 6 with a spare, for what I thought was maximum security against data loss, so the WD bug must have occurred on two drives simultaneously.
I had had the problem on Friday with only one disk, and the RAID had rebuilt using my hot spare, so I had already discovered the instability of the Western Digital drives. But on the weekend I had had trouble getting to someone with a desktop PC with SATA interface so I could update the firmware on the WD2500YS drives.
Then last night I shut the Thecus down because of a severe windstorm and the fact that the thing won't talk to my UPS for a proper shutdown in case of power failure(which does tick me off - Thecus has to fix their lousy support for communicating with UPSs - preferably also supporting USB). When I booted up this morning, the RAID was damaged.
My issue I'm hoping for help with is this: I'm certain that the drive contents are fine, and the Thecus even says that the disks themselves are all fine now, so is their any way I can restore the RAID system without rebuilding it? Basically what's happened is that drives incorrectly reported disk errors, so they got dropped from the RAID unnecessarily. It seems to me that it should be just a matter of tweaking some table somewhere, somehow. Are there tools around that can help do this? Has anyone successfully run them on a Thecus system?
I'm lucky enough that I've only lost my backups for work stuff. But I have lost my entire collection of music.
A note for Thecus: please consider including recovery tools to try to correct this kind of problem. It can't be that uncommon, especially with a whole line of buggy Western Digital drives out there. There must be something GPL out there to fix at least simple problems like this.
I had had the problem on Friday with only one disk, and the RAID had rebuilt using my hot spare, so I had already discovered the instability of the Western Digital drives. But on the weekend I had had trouble getting to someone with a desktop PC with SATA interface so I could update the firmware on the WD2500YS drives.
Then last night I shut the Thecus down because of a severe windstorm and the fact that the thing won't talk to my UPS for a proper shutdown in case of power failure(which does tick me off - Thecus has to fix their lousy support for communicating with UPSs - preferably also supporting USB). When I booted up this morning, the RAID was damaged.
My issue I'm hoping for help with is this: I'm certain that the drive contents are fine, and the Thecus even says that the disks themselves are all fine now, so is their any way I can restore the RAID system without rebuilding it? Basically what's happened is that drives incorrectly reported disk errors, so they got dropped from the RAID unnecessarily. It seems to me that it should be just a matter of tweaking some table somewhere, somehow. Are there tools around that can help do this? Has anyone successfully run them on a Thecus system?
I'm lucky enough that I've only lost my backups for work stuff. But I have lost my entire collection of music.
A note for Thecus: please consider including recovery tools to try to correct this kind of problem. It can't be that uncommon, especially with a whole line of buggy Western Digital drives out there. There must be something GPL out there to fix at least simple problems like this.