Requesting advice/ recommendations for steps forward. Is the NAS cooked? Could I upgrade the drives and still get some life out of it?. How likely is it just a single bay (not the disk) failed on the nas?

All of the system was bought second hand about 2 years ago but factory wiped. Drives look like they’ve got 4-5 years runtime on them before I bought it.

I’ve got a 4 bay nas it has 4x3TB drives in it. A few days ago there was an issue with Bay 1 where it lost sync or something. I pulled it out and put it back in and removed it from the volume and re initialized it and it came up good.

Yesterday the light for bay 1 didn’t come on and system showed as degraded.

I tried to fault find by swapping the disks in bays 1 and 2. And I think it gave light on bay 1 but am not sure. I’m not in a position to try again as priority 1 is to make a copy of all data on the nas as-is.

When I put everything back as it was bay 2 came up with a partition error, so I stopped fault finding and started data copying.

My plan is to remove all data and then fault find to see if drive of bay is the issue and then possibly re initialized a volume with bays 2-4 as raid 5. But there’s part of me saying once a failure has occurred there’s likely to be a second one soon.

Edit: I also got a warning about increased fan noise but it didn’t sound louder to me.

Thanks in advance.

  • @[email protected]
    3•10 months ago

    What raid did you run?

    In general I’d advice against running used drives for anything other than testing/experimental use.

    Regarding noise, if it is just the fan, check the dust filters and clean if needed, it might also be the fan getting worn out, might be worth looking into replacing it just to be safe, since Noctua is the king of computer fans, I’d recommend starting researching how to replace the fan with a noctua one.

    If I was in this situation, I’d get a new hard drive that can fit everything on it, copy all data to it, then format the NAS drives and set up the NAS as new.

    However, I’d still keep the new drive as a cold backup of the data.

    • @Possible_EmuWranglerOPEnglish
      2•10 months ago

      Thanks. It was RAID5, so “parity” drives gone.

      Once the datas off, I’ll take out all deices and have a look around inside and see about the fans.

      The nas isn’t the only storage on site, there’s a smaller bought new single drive nas, but it can’t store everything and some things went straight to the bit bucket.

      I’m liking your plan. Something like a 10gb, and run it single plus probably keep two 3’s as raid 1 and manually copy data between them.