My Big Scare with a NAS...

**nicoff** · February 5, 2019, 08:08 PM

I got a big scare with my NAS.

A few days ago I get a notification from my NAS (Drobo) telling me that one of the 5 drives failed. The Drobo holds my entire music library.

No big deal I think. I decided that since the existing drives are old and prices have come way down, I should replace not one but two drives with bigger ones.

Last evening the two new 6T drives arrive. They will be replacing two fairly old 1T drives. First I remove the damaged drive and insert a new one. The Drobo lights flash red indicating that the new drive is not working properly. Shoot.

Thinking that maybe I zapped the new drive I decided to swap it with the second new drive.

In my quest to do it quickly, I pushed the wrong button and removed one of the still working 1T drives. Now I only have three 1T drives in the unit and the Drobo goes crazy with all lights flashing yellow! And a "Critical" warning sign on the computer. All I can think of is 'Oh s***t'.

I managed to install the two new drives. The Drobo announces that it will take 17 hours to complete the installation. Meanwhile the Drobo has disappeared from the directory and the yellow and green lights continue to flash.

Five hours later (glad that it did not take all 17 hours) the process is completed. I try to connect the Drobo to the computer but nothing happens. The Drobo will not connect and is not shown anywhere. I restart the computer and the Drobo, again nothing happens.

Then I look at the capacity of the Drobo and it appear as if the drives are almost empty. I am like, 'where did my data go?'

More research makes me realize that I should have only replaced one drive at a time. I read about a repair tool within the Drobo. After a whole bunch of 'Proceed with caution' and other warnings is when I finally realized that I really messed up. The Drobo announces that it started the repair. The fine print says that "the repair may run for several days, weeks or months" and you will not see any indicators that show progress and I think...'Oh S***t'.

In the middle of the night I realized that last month I had cancelled my automatic cloud backup and had asked my wife to copy the Drobo files to her cloud drive. This morning I replace the usual good morning with 'Did you copy the Drobo files to your cloud drive?" and she replies 'what is Drobo?' and I am like O-H S***T!

By midday today I realize that all the hours/days that I spent ripping my music collection is likely gone. Just the thought of having to do it all over again gives me pain. I wonder what else did I have in the Drobo that is gone too.

At about 6pm today, nearly 24 hours after the ordeal started, the Drobo announces that the repair is complete and that I need to restart the Drobo. Still nothing shows connected to the computer. I cautiously restart the Drobo and a few minutes later... voila. The Drobo and all the files reappear as if nothing happened.

Boy I was lucky. I just finished making a copy of the Drobo to a cloud drive.

**joeinid** · February 5, 2019, 08:21 PM

You certainly were lucky!

Always backup first and replace failed/old drives one at a time until the unit is fully rebuilt after each replacement. Thank goodness.

**Oly** · February 5, 2019, 08:25 PM

Whew! Disaster averted.

**still-one** · February 5, 2019, 08:43 PM

I have been using computers since the early 80's and have never had a drive fail. I back up nothing other than what OSX does which has zero music on it. I figure if my drive fails I will just load the music I listen to again. It will just save me a music cull.

**nicoff** · February 5, 2019, 09:29 PM

Originally Posted by still-one

I have been using computers since the early 80's and have never had a drive fail. I back up nothing other than what OSX does which has zero music on it. I figure if my drive fails I will just load the music I listen to again. It will just save me a music cull.

The two drives that I replaced were manufactured in 2010 and 2011. That's 8 or 9 years running pretty much full time. I think that is likely to be much more usage than most folks use.

**Hounddog** · February 5, 2019, 10:08 PM

Originally Posted by still-one

I have been using computers since the early 80's and have never had a drive fail. I back up nothing other than what OSX does which has zero music on it. I figure if my drive fails I will just load the music I listen to again. It will just save me a music cull.

You’re lucky. I’ve had two fail, one of which cost me $600 to have restored and the second I had backed up (because of the lesson I learned on the first one). Now, I have the NAS, amazon drive (cloud) and everything on a hard drive that I store at the office. In addition to my music, I have about 40,000 photos that I care an awful lot about.

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk Pro

**jdandy** · February 5, 2019, 11:16 PM

Real men don't need no stinking manual. .

**Randy Myers** · February 6, 2019, 09:30 AM

Yes I would say you were lucky. In a Raid configuration always replace one at a time to allow the NAS to reconfigure itself across the drives.

I keep all my music on my server but I do retain three backups of all my files, one on a network drive and two on external drives (one external has full backup and the other which is smaller only has the most important files, music and photos

)

**nicoff** · February 6, 2019, 10:56 AM

Three of the original drives are still in the unit. Like the one that failed, they must be 8-9 years. That means that they could also fail at any time. So I just selected "Dual Disk Redundancy" in the Drobo settings. That setting uses up more space but data is kept safe even if two hard drives fail. Better safe than sorry!

**Randy Myers** · February 6, 2019, 11:37 AM

Better safe then sorry. If you plan it out right there is no reason you could not replace all of the drives, one at a time... right... this would give you all fresh drives if this is a major concern for you.

**nicoff** · February 7, 2019, 12:47 PM

Originally Posted by Randy Myers

Better safe then sorry. If you plan it out right there is no reason you could not replace all of the drives, one at a time... right... this would give you all fresh drives if this is a major concern for you.

Very good points Randy.

This has led me to an interesting discovery. I had five 1T drives (5T raw). I replaced two of them with two 6T drives and ended up with 15T raw. So the net raw added capacity is 10T.

Yet net increase in available space for data is only 4.54T. Where did all the added raw capacity go?

The Drobo calculator confirmed that the efficiency changed from 72.3% (all disks the same size) to about 55% (three 1T plus two 6T).

If I had read the manual (thank you jdandy!

) I should have replaced all five disks with same size disks to keep the same efficiency level.

Needless to say, I will be replacing the three remaining old drives with new ones. I already notice and Improvement in acceding the data. This is expected since the new drives are much faster and have bigger cache.

**MikeCh** · February 7, 2019, 01:39 PM

Good to know you got it recovered OK!

Back about 10 years ago when I used to manage servers and storage at an enterprise class level, RAID Storage replacements did require drives to be similar size across the RAID (at least that's what we followed). Perhaps technology has changed to allow disimilar sized hard drives within the RAID? If so, the parity striping (the bits and pieces that allow a drive to be rebuilt from the data spread across the other drives) may be taking more resources and creating the inefficiency values that you now see....????

This is just my speculation (if the technology exists) that having disimilar drives creates more work for the intelligence of the RAID drive array (also eats up more space to store that parity info) and hence a bit lower efficiency for storage and retrieval.

**Randy Myers** · February 7, 2019, 02:18 PM

Originally Posted by nicoff

Very good points Randy.

This has led me to an interesting discovery. I had five 1T drives (5T raw). I replaced two of them with two 6T drives and ended up with 15T raw. So the net raw added capacity is 10T.

Yet net increase in available space for data is only 4.54T. Where did all the added raw capacity go?

The Drobo calculator confirmed that the efficiency changed from 72.3% (all disks the same size) to about 55% (three 1T plus two 6T).

If I had read the manual (thank you jdandy!

) I should have replaced all five disks with same size disks to keep the same efficiency level.

Needless to say, I will be replacing the three remaining old drives with new ones. I already notice and Improvement in acceding the data. This is expected since the new drives are much faster and have bigger cache.

I am definitely not an expert in RAID and NAS setups, however during the past 6 months I have purchased a new NAS and a new Server for work. Both are using RAID 5 which require a minimal of three equal drives. Both QNap and Dell told me that all drives in the RAID require being the same size for the RAID to work correctly.

I do not know for sure, but I am guessing if you added a different size drives into the mix the RAID may not be reading it correctly???? It sounds like one of the new drives is being read as the same size as the original drives, 1T, to make the RAID work, and therefore your additional space would be closer to what you are saying that you are seeing. Again, I am only speculating here.

**octadyndude** · February 7, 2019, 02:53 PM

Nicoff not sure what level of raid you're running. What was your total storage with just the 5 - 1TB drives? Anyhow when you get get the 3 remaining drives I would suggest the following. Shut down the Nas logically. When it's off pull only 1 1tb drive and power it up again. Let it see the missing drive and shut it down again. Now add 1 new drive. Bring it back up and let the Nas do its thing. Once that completed do the same thing 1 drive at a time. Check your total capacity each time too.

5 drives in a raid doesn't make sense to me unless the 5th drive is configured as a 'hot swap". Hot swap being a drive that is formatted ready to use making the rebuild time shorter. Here is a link to raid configurations.

https://www.prepressure.com/library/technology/raid

**nicoff** · February 7, 2019, 04:59 PM

Thank you guys!
Drobo advertised that their technology is not the traditional Raid technology.

This is from their site: "Drobo connects to your computer or network and provides redundant data protection without the complexities of traditional RAID."

I have confirmed that Drobo allows you to have drives of different sizes but the cost is lower efficiency.

Here are three examples:
With five 1T drives:

With two 6T drives and three 1T drives.

And just another with four different sizes.

The system works. Now I need to buy three more drives. I am considering buying drives with 4T capacity. That will give me 16.34T capacity.

If I go with five 6T, I get 21.78TB.

You can do a hot swap with any of the drives. But it has to be done one at a time, unless I select "dual disk redundancy" which means that two drives can fail at the same time and the data remains protected. Of course, the disk redundancy makes less data available for storage.

**wisnon** · February 8, 2019, 07:33 AM

Originally Posted by nicoff

I got a big scare with my NAS.

A few days ago I get a notification from my NAS (Drobo) telling me that one of the 5 drives failed. The Drobo holds my entire music library.

Boy I was lucky. I just finished making a copy of the Drobo to a cloud drive.

What no physical backup???

I have an offline physical backup for my 16tb of music, net 16tb after duplications.

**wisnon** · February 8, 2019, 07:36 AM

Originally Posted by Randy Myers

Yes I would say you were lucky. In a Raid configuration always replace one at a time to allow the NAS to reconfigure itself across the drives.

I keep all my music on my server but I do retain three backups of all my files, one on a network drive and two on external drives (one external has full backup and the other which is smaller only has the most important files, music and photos

)

I don't use RAID...waste of space. Physical backup...that is the way to go.

**Randy Myers** · February 8, 2019, 09:21 AM

I agree for personal use. In professional server environments it is essential that everything is redundant. Even hot swap power supplies.

However at home I use regular physical backups, as you see... actually three

...

**wisnon** · February 8, 2019, 10:03 AM

Originally Posted by Randy Myers

I agree for personal use. In professional server environments it is essential that everything is redundant. Even hot swap power supplies.

However at home I use regular physical backups, as you see... actually three

...

Agreed. I don't do regular backup though, I do bull redundancy that is never turned on again except if I ever need to restore, and only then. They suffer no wear and tear as they are never energised.

**nicoff** · February 8, 2019, 01:59 PM

I just noticed that two of the three remaining old drives have a "warning" sign. That is an indication that they can fail any moment.

I ordered three new 6T drives yesterday (decided to keep all of them the same size). Meanwhile, I have backed up all my music files to the cloud and have selected dual disk redundancy in the Drobo. With dual disk redundancy two drives can fail at the same time and I am still protected.

I am amazed at how much faster the new drives respond when moving, copying, pasting. I assume that the same applies to data transfer when streaming. However, there is no difference in the sound when streaming from the NAS (I was not expecting any change either).

**Randy Myers** · February 8, 2019, 02:21 PM

Very good Nico! That should work a lot better for you. That is a crazy amount of space... I mean, dam... you will probably have about 24 TB or so space available.

Considering that I have almost 1000 albums (a couple hundred CD rips and the rest are high resolution downloads and SACD rips), many of which are DSD (several hundred) including 50+ that are DSD128 & DSD256, etc., and I have only about 2-2.5 TB of space being taken up.

**KeithR** · February 8, 2019, 02:45 PM

After I had a HDD failure (first in 10 years), I now keep an off-site backup to prevent future issues. easy peasy.

I paid $400 for the guy to get the data off my old drive - not much actually as it took him several days, sector by sector. Also did some upgrades to the Mac Mini while in the shop so it came back a new machine

**nicoff** · February 8, 2019, 03:33 PM

Originally Posted by Randy Myers

Very good Nico! That should work a lot better for you. That is a crazy amount of space... I mean, dam... you will probably have about 24 TB or so space available.

Considering that I have almost 1000 albums (a couple hundred CD rips and the rest are high resolution downloads and SACD rips), many of which are DSD (several hundred) including 50+ that are DSD128 & DSD256, etc., and I have only about 2-2.5 TB of space being taken up.

With five 6TBdrives, I get about 22TB available for data storage. If I select dual disk redundancy, I would end up with 16T available for data. Either way, a huge amount and definitely much more than I need! I hope that I will not have to worry about storage space ever!

**MikeCh** · February 8, 2019, 03:53 PM

Originally Posted by nicoff

I hope that I will not have to worry about storage space ever!

Famous last words! Lol

**nicoff** · February 8, 2019, 04:16 PM

**Randy Myers** · February 8, 2019, 04:17 PM

If you fill that amount up you would never be able to listen to them all

...

**Kingrex** · February 9, 2019, 02:22 PM

I find that many people misunderstand raid/nas drives. Because you have multiple drives does not mean you have anything backed up. A virus or corruption on 1 drive can populate to all drives. I always keep a complete backup in a static proof bag in a cardboard box. I also have a couple friends holding a drive for me.

**octadyndude** · February 9, 2019, 02:37 PM

Lets not forget the way Nas enclosures format drives so they are not easily readable. It's designed that way so if someone walks off with a drive they won't be able to read it. I just had an intermittent drive in my primary Nas and when I tried to format it in my computer it couldn't. It showed the 2TB drive as only having about 200MB. I used disk management and forced a format. It now shows 2TB. I gave it to my son to use in his computer telling him it is very flaky. The Nas did rebuild the drive once but failed the second time over a 2 week period.

**astrotoy** · February 9, 2019, 11:16 PM

Glad to hear you got your data back. I have a couple of Drobo units and have upgraded their capacity over the years. I think they are all 4TB drives, been using WD Reds which have been extremely reliable compared to Seagates (boo!). My main digital music collection is in a large Synology box. I use the Synology version of RAID 5 (called SHR) which allows you to mix and match drive sizes. The box has 12 drives which I have completely populated with 8TB drives. Synology has a system where it is constantly monitoring the health of the drives (bad segments, etc) and sends a message when the drives are getting weak, so you can replace them before they fail. I have about 60TB of music files, including the 40TB from my giant ripping project (10,000 vinyl and tape albums at 192/24). In addition to the Synology Raid backup, I have two completely separate sets of backups, on external drives. One is at home and the other in two big safe deposit boxes in the local bank. Really important point made earlier that the Box itself can fail, or get infected, taking more than one drive down, so external backups are mandatory.

Larry

**wisnon** · February 11, 2019, 09:55 AM

Originally Posted by wisnon

Agreed. I don't do regular backup though, I do bull redundancy that is never turned on again except if I ever need to restore, and only then. They suffer no wear and tear as they are never energised.

Typo...FULL redundancy.

I use the JBOD option. 18tb with about 2 TB of duplications that I cant be bothered to track down and delete, as its not a simple process. Is it a true duplication or a different mastering or upsampled version? It takes time to review and decide and its not worth it to me.

**wisnon** · February 11, 2019, 09:57 AM

Originally Posted by Kingrex

I find that many people misunderstand raid/nas drives. Because you have multiple drives does not mean you have anything backed up. A virus or corruption on 1 drive can populate to all drives. I always keep a complete backup in a static proof bag in a cardboard box. I also have a couple friends holding a drive for me.

Yup, I do the friend thing too. LoL
Only the paranoid stay safe. LoL

**wisnon** · February 11, 2019, 09:58 AM

Originally Posted by Randy Myers

If you fill that amount up you would never be able to listen to them all

...

To me that does not matter...if someone discusses an album or track, I like the fact that I have a high chance of having it in my library to go review. Streaming is nice, but you don't own the Cloud, the Cloud "owns" you. Heheheh

**wisnon** · February 11, 2019, 10:00 AM

Originally Posted by astrotoy

Glad to hear you got your data back. I have a couple of Drobo units and have upgraded their capacity over the years. I think they are all 4TB drives, been using WD Reds which have been extremely reliable compared to Seagates (boo!). My main digital music collection is in a large Synology box. I use the Synology version of RAID 5 (called SHR) which allows you to mix and match drive sizes. The box has 12 drives which I have completely populated with 8TB drives. Synology has a system where it is constantly monitoring the health of the drives (bad segments, etc) and sends a message when the drives are getting weak, so you can replace them before they fail. I have about 60TB of music files, including the 40TB from my giant ripping project (10,000 vinyl and tape albums at 192/24). In addition to the Synology Raid backup, I have two completely separate sets of backups, on external drives. One is at home and the other in two big safe deposit boxes in the local bank. Really important point made earlier that the Box itself can fail, or get infected, taking more than one drive down, so external backups are mandatory.

Larry

My hat is off to you, Sir Larry!

**AJ Soundfield** · February 11, 2019, 01:50 PM

Originally Posted by wisnon

My hat is off to you, Sir Larry!

Hate to thread crash, but your inbox is full and cannot accept messages. FYI

**wisnon** · February 11, 2019, 05:15 PM

Hi AJ...I emptied it out.

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