Beeeping plus - please advise quickly

The post looks good. I haven't tried pulling a drive, then powering down, reinserting the pulled drive, and powering up.

You seem very concerned about losing data. Maybe while you are shopping you could look for a SATA/USB adapter (with power supply) or a USB shell. Then you could test for the beep using a Windows PC, with the NAS safely shut down. With the right software tools you can also pull the data off the first hard drive.

Hi again,

I was unable to get out to buy drives today but started thinking.

Any reason I cannot pull one drive when powered down, power up and if no beeps I know I got lucky. Then run on one drive until I get the second. Or, if it does beep, power down and swap drives and power up. This way, there would be no reason to resync at any point until I had at least one new drive in. I think this is my major concern as if I pull the wrong drive, then put in the pulled drive hot and resync, could take hours of beeping and stress on the bad drive.

You seem to favor all hot swapping Stephen, so had to ask if this works or not.

Thanks.
~Bob

Some people have trouble booting up on the second disk (the xraid parity volume). Though I don't see much risk with your method, as along as you keep the drives in their original slots.

Hot-swapping is best (in my experience) if you are wanting/needing to resync. Power-down is best (and really the only way) to avoid resync.

What PCs do you have? I'm still wondering if off-line troubleshooting is an option for you.

PC's?

This is connected to a gigabit switch and my primary computer on the network is a Lenovo W50 laptop.

The reasons I keep asking without doing are:

1. I have not been able to go out and buy new drives. And I will replace both
2. I am concerned about failure of a drive of this needs to resync as I recall that take 6-8 hours
3. I cannot be sure, but I believe I heard the beep from disk 1 - the one on the left.

~Bob

And you're sticking with me on this is incredibly appreciated Stephen.

W500? Anyway, I believe that doesn't have eSata (though my T410 does).

For off-line testing (and potentially data recovery) you can get a USB 2.0 ->SATA adapter kit (with a power brick for the disk) for $10-$20 on line. $30-$40 if you want USB 3.0 All of these should work with 2 TB drives. A 3.5 inch USB drive enclosure is also a way to connect your existing drives (one at a time) to your laptop. The enclosure would also let you re-use the good existing drive for NAS backup later on. Just pointing out that these are options for you.

Resync does take a while, and it does require every sector on the old drive to be read (so it can be mirrored on the new one).

Oops. W530

So, now a bit confused. If I go with the hot swap and pull the wrong drive, then I have to reinsert it and hope the bad drive does not fail before resync occurs? If I get lucky, I pull the failing drive, replace with new and resync and all good. Then pull the older drive, replace with new and resync and done. But if I make the wrong choice I stand to have issues.

What do you recommend I try Stephen?

Off to go buy two drives finally.

~bob

Ahh, the more I think, the more confused I get :) or maybe better, :(

I now find this while searching a bit on drive beeping and wonder if its the NAS rather than the drives:

"Glad you got it sorted out! However, as other members suggested, it was basically a power issue. The hard drives creates such beeping sounds in case if it's unable to draw the required power from SMPS (or the SMPS is stubborn and not letting the drive to draw the power). "

And ow with new drives, even if I did try to isolate the drive with an external enclosure, if its drive one you say I may not be able to boot to drive two, so then what?

If there was a way to get around having to sync if I pull one or the other old drive, I could try this and see, But now, not sure if it is the actual NAS, and don't want to burn through $260 of new drives if that is not the issue. And need to do something to get this back online.

So, if I power and decide its a bad drive 1, I can pull that and stay online and sync to new drive? If it is not the bad drive, can I power down. Reinsert drive 1 and pull drive 2 and repower, put in new drive and sync?

Just really trying to measure twice and cut once. And minimize the potential of having to sync and lose a drive in the priocess making the situation worse.

~Bob

I'm not seeing your link, so I'm not certain which post you are referencing. There are issues in some 4 bay units related to power draw - they stagger their drive spin up to avoid it.

In any case hard drives are not supposed to beep. If you are thinking that there is some feature in the drive that produces the beep as a warning, then you are incorrect. Beeps happen in hard drives because the mechanical mechanism is doing something it is not designed to do. Also, it seems unlikely in your case that this is power related, since these drives have been working w/o any issues in your duo for years.

Isolating the drive with power down via the enclosure is pretty safe. If it is drive one, you reinsert it back into the NAS, and power up. Then pull the drive, and replace it. If neither drives beeps in the enclosure when you test the drives, then you know something else is going on (unlikely though it seems).

Also, if you have an enclosure, it is possible to pull the data off of the drive if you need to. That isn't possible with normal windows drivers, but there are a couple of programs that can access linux file systems.

So, today had to try to make this right. The strangest thing - it booted with no noises or beeps at all! None. So I decided it had an issue, let's take the gamble to replace the drives as I have two new.

Removed drive 1 as I am purely guessing which dive has the issue. Installed new drive and as of now, 16 % synced with 7 + hours to go. No issues. If this syncs, I'll replace the other drive and consider that I got lucky. Fingers crossed.

But this brings up a new question:

What happens if I ever want to replace this DUO with another NAS? How would I move all the data?

OK, cannot sit and watch this sync so going to find some sunshine....

~Bob

If you buy a new NAS, the best option is to migrate your data over the network. If its another ReadyNAS you can do this with a backup job.