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Failing drive replacement - oppurtunity to upgrade to v2 of Drivepool?


benmmellor

Question

I have an N54L running 4x 2TB WD Greens which are a few yrs old now - they previously sat in my Netgear ReadyNAS and had no issues.

 

The 4 drives are configured as one big drive pool - boot is from a 250GB disk on it's own.

 

Server OS is WHS 2011

 

One of the2TB  drives has started logging 'unstable sectors' under S.M.A.R.T and reported back via StableBit Scanner as I got the automated email. It's only got a count of 19 at the moment, but in order to protect myself I'm planning on swapping this disk out to a 3TB WD Red unit. This will be part of a rolling migration as and when I can afford to buy new drives.

 

I know that I can drop the suspect disk out of the drivepool and swap it out when I power down the N54L. This may take some time to migrate the data into the remaining drives.

 

I'm also wondering if I should take this opportunity to upgrade to the v2 of Drivepool? 

 

If so what would be the recommended procedure (assuming I can leave the data on the remaining 2TB disks for the process!)

 

Thanks in advance!

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First, I'm sorry to hear about the disk issues. :(

 

As for removing the disk, if it's going to stay in the system for a while, then you could use the "Disk Usage Limiter" balancer to only place duplicated data on that drive. Or you can use the balancer to force everything off of the disk right now.

 

Either way, that makes removing the disk later very simple. 

 

 

If you just want to remove it now, (or for later) you can just remove it from the pool. There should be that option in the storage tab to do so. Just right click on the pooled disk, and remove it. It will take a while to move the contents off (depending on which options you select). 

 

And this moves the data onto the other disks in the pool, and removes JUST that disk from the pool.

 

 

 

 

As for StableBit DrivePool 2.X, you can try that out on the system as well. Just uninstall the current version, reboot, install the new version and reboot. 

However, the 1.X version does feature better integration into the dashboard, so you may want to keep on using that.

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Ok well I did a backup and had planed to pick up another drive this week but not had time.

 

I've removed the disk from the pool and all the data has migrated - a concept I'm pretty familiar with in my experience as I've worked with IBM AS/400's for years and they use a similar concept of pooling disks.

 

The drive itself hasn't been any more trouble but I've set WD Lifeguard running a full test anyway.

 

How do I find the Disk Usage Limiter Tab and set it to hold just the duplicate files if I add it back into the pool until I can get around to picking up a new disk after Xmas?

 

Edit - found the plug-ins so tinkering now. At the moment the remaining 3 drives are re-distributing my duplicated data so will have that finish and then tweak the drive pool.

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well 2 new 3TB WD Red's should land tomorrow ready for an install and 'gig-mig' when I add the first disk into the pool to replace the 1st failing drive.

 

Funnily enough the WD lifeguard full scan doesn't issue a warning on the disk!

 

The data move to the remaining 3 drives in the pool seems to have triggered a new unstable sector on another disk so planning to swap that one.

Got them from scan.co.uk - £185 for two drives delivered - would have cost me more in petrol to do the 30 mile round trip to pick them up than I paid for delivery!

 

Any recommended tests/checks to do on the new drives once I install them prior to moving data onto them?

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Well, the WD Lifeguard tools may be ignoring the "Unstable Sector Count", as in some cases these sectors can be recovered (or reallocated).  However, if they're growing, it's usually better to replace the disk...

 

 

 

As for the "triggering of new" sectors, it's less of triggering, and more of "discovering". As the sectors are read or written to, the disk will detect and report this. So activity on the disk will cause this to grow (part of why the surface scan is such a good idea, as it will identify issues like this). 

 

As for Scan.co.uk, I've heard of the site, but never used it (well, I live in the US... so that's understandable). But glad that they seem to have some very nice prices!

 

 

As for recommended tests/checks? You mean other than letting StableBit Scanner do a full surface scan first, right? :)

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