raid
New Member
Posts: 2
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Post by raid on Nov 29, 2006 3:32:20 GMT 7
I recently purchased a new UPS to hook my N5200 to. I shut down the N5200 and disconnected it from the old UPS. When I plugged it into the new UPS and booted it up, it stated that my raid status was degraded. I had 3 drives in RAID 5. All still show that their status is okay; however, now it shows that the third drive is not part of the array and the check box under "spare" is available. I can access all of my data like normal. My questions are:
-Any ideas as to why this happened, and why it did not repair itself? I have "Add new disk as spare disk?" set to manual...perhaps this is part of the problem of not auto-rebuilding? -To repair: Should I set it set the third drive as a spare, or should I go to "Migrate" and check all three drives and click "RAID 5 -> RAID 5"? Or does it not matter?
Thank you in advance
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Post by quick on Nov 29, 2006 22:37:09 GMT 7
Hi.... For my own interests I ask: What firmware are you running? There is a point described for the firmware that looks alot like your situation (after power up). -----CUT RAID rebuild : in case one HDD failed in RAID 1, 5, 6, and 10 configuration, please hot unplug failed one and hot plug in new one; then RAID rebuilding will automatically start. If the replacement is done after NAS rebooting or shutdown, administrator has to manually add spare in Admin Web GUI to start the RAID rebuilding. -----CUT If you did shutdown it before cutting power, then I don't understand why you should loose a drive in your raid
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raid
New Member
Posts: 2
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Post by raid on Nov 30, 2006 5:15:54 GMT 7
I have firmware 1.00.04.9 installed. It works (worked?) flawlessly. The unit was off, I unplugged it, and when I plugged it back in it did turn on by itself. I suppose I should have shut the power off via the on/off switch on the back. However, even if that was the problem, it is concerning since there are a variety of power situation (such as power outage) that could result in the same situation.
I ended up clicking the check box to add the third drive as a spare and it rebuilt the array. Runs great again. I would just like to prevent it from happening again.
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ss42
New Member
Posts: 16
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Post by ss42 on Dec 2, 2006 23:19:46 GMT 7
We have three 5200s all with v1.00.04 firmware. All using WD5000YS drives in 5-drive raid-5 configuration. We have seen this "degraded" problem show up randomly on all units. The scenario goes like this:
1. NAS in healthy state is shutdown from the GUI. 2. When powered back up at a later time by pressing the front-panel power button, the NAS wakes up in the degraded state. 4. Inspection of the logfile shows that one of the disks wasn't discovered. All drives show SMART data OK. So we do a rebuild (about 6 hours for 500GB drives), and things come back to normal.
The non-green workaround is to keep NAS on at all times. But this feels like a firmware bug or race condition with the suposedly raid-friendly WD5000YS drives.
Guessing that either at shutdown the firmware isn't flushing everything right; or at power-up, the firmware is probing the disk before it is ready. Either way it is a serious problem we wish Thecus would address with high priority.
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nlrela
Junior Member
Posts: 56
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Post by nlrela on Dec 5, 2006 1:06:07 GMT 7
Have had the same issue with firmware 1.00.04 firmware and 5x WD5000YS drives in raid-5 configuration. Though I could not restore the raid anymore. Luckily there was no important data at the N5200, so I've rebuilt the RAID.
To me this seems to be a serious issue as well, cause a degraded RAID is similar to JBOD ... only with less free disk space ....
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ss42
New Member
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Post by ss42 on Dec 5, 2006 9:03:30 GMT 7
Nice to know I'm not alone - misery loves company. A couple of points:
a) Thecus support has emailed me right back and said they are aware of the problem and it is high priority for them. They asked me to capture conf files and we have sent them for both the non-degraded and degraded state. Hope that gives them a clue to the root cause.
b) We are nervous, but have twice (going on three times now) rebuilt the array by adding the "missing" disk as a spare and waiting the 6~7 hours to print the parity across the fifth drive. If nothing else we know the raid-5 rebuild works for 5-drives! (Sure is scary having nothing during the rebuild).
If anyone else has this problem or a clue, please share. My suspicion remains that it is some race conditon on shutdown or startup and that there is nothing really "wrong" just a critical error about a disk's presence. If I had infinite time, I'd sector copy each of the five disks out, 1 by 1, and hunt for the "funk" in the disk state, if any.
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Post by ccantrell on Dec 14, 2006 11:14:20 GMT 7
Exact same problem happened to me today. 5 drives, all show OK but RAID-5 is degraded and had to add spare to manually start the rebuild process. I am scared to really start using this system until the bugs get worked out.
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Post by mwk on Dec 14, 2006 12:20:27 GMT 7
... If anyone else has this problem or a clue, please share. My suspicion remains that it is some race conditon on shutdown or startup and that there is nothing really "wrong" just a critical error about a disk's presence. .... Similar things happen on my N2100. Sometimes when I accidentally kicked loose the power plug, and my N2100 will boot up as degraded raid. When I turn off the machine by pressing the power button or Web UI, it never comes up as degraded. Is it caused by not properly unmounting the RAID? How do you normally turn off the N5200?
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Post by icgorilla on Dec 16, 2006 2:38:23 GMT 7
I've got the same degraded raid after power-up problem. My setup is the N5200BR with 5 WD5000YS disks. It's happened to me twice. The second time was a little over a week ago, just after I upgraded the firmware to 1.00.04. After the first time, I did a hot unplug/plug of the "forgotten" disk (#5 on the bottom of the disk stack) and the raid successfully rebuilt overnight. This made me a little nervous, because if I pull the wrong drive out I probably lose all my data... The second occasion
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Post by icgorilla on Dec 16, 2006 2:51:32 GMT 7
As I was saying.... The second occasion (this time #4 disk) I used the admin page and added the forgotten disk as a spare and again the raid rebuilt to healthy status. Both times I used the front-panel button to power on/off. I'd done this several times without problems, but since the degrading started, I don't power the unit off anymore. I noticed during the power down before the second degrade event, that the unit seemed to suddenly turn off - like what happens when you pull the power plug from a computer. I'm used to a milder sequenced shutdown, but the unit looked and sounded like there was a sudden power loss - a noisy thunk, followed by disks spinning down..maybe it's just my imagination... Thecus has not responded to two email requests for help - it's been more than a week since I tried to contact them. I'm not happy with them at all.
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Post by quick on Dec 16, 2006 3:17:33 GMT 7
I have used to always logon to the GUI and trigger a shutdown of my box.
And when it is silent and dark, disconnect power/move-it/whatever.
Never had any issues with shuting down my box.
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Post by turtlesoup on Dec 17, 2006 8:58:18 GMT 7
I noticed during the power down before the second degrade event, that the unit seemed to suddenly turn off - like what happens when you pull the power plug from a computer. I'm used to a milder sequenced shutdown, but the unit looked and sounded like there was a sudden power loss - a noisy thunk, followed by disks spinning down..maybe it's just my imagination... Well, it finally happened to me. The power went off yesterday (n5200 is on a UPS) so I powered down the unit from the front panel. Same thing... big thunk then it was off. Today the power came back and when I booted it up, it was making a horrible noise. I believe it was the fan. Anyway it was in degraded state so I rebooted from the GUI. The horrible noise went away but still came back in a degraded state. The GUI shows disc 5 is not part of the raid. I guess I'll try and add it back as a spare but I really don't want to lose the data. Oh and I have the WD 500YS discs as well.
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nlrela
Junior Member
Posts: 56
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Post by nlrela on Dec 17, 2006 16:23:56 GMT 7
And today I got a degraded raid 5 without rebooting. Just the first disk was disappeared. Pulled it out and put it back and raid is rebuilding again. Especially since I don't get the email notification working (doubting whether anyone has it working and whether the functionality has really been built in, no proper support from Thecus at least) it is actually unacceptable that the raid is degrading quite often. Bought a raid system to have save backup possibilities, but now I do have to backup my backup system, otherwise I will loose my data........
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Post by N2100Owner on Dec 17, 2006 22:01:25 GMT 7
I believe you are using WD5000YS, correct?
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jamis
Full Member
Posts: 109
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Post by jamis on Dec 17, 2006 22:16:35 GMT 7
I have yet to experience this problem... though I don't have the same disks...
WD4000 YR
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