Ready for expansion (RN Pro Pioneer Edition)-Seeking Advice

winger13 wrote:
...I thought I read somewhere on this forum that a small amount of ATA errors could be acceptable IF low amount and does not increase in number? I did a search but could not find it the other day.

There are several causes for ATA errors. Most are hardware related, but this is one of the few SMART errors that can be generated by software drivers in the computer (e.g. the ReadyNAS).

However, in your case the drive has all of a sudden generated a burst of errors - so firmware driver issues are not the cause. It might be ok, but it needs more investigation. Most drive failures also result in other errors (CRC errors on the interface, reallocated or pending sectors, etc). Though I did have one drive that started generating ATA errors with no other bad stats. I ended up replacing it.

Anyway, after you post the stats I will either followup with a suggestion to do another scrub, or a suggestion to replace the drive - depending on what I see.

You should certainly have an up-to-date backup. Even if you don't have enough backup space, you should back up critical files right away.

FYI a disk scrub on the 4.2.x firmware reads every sector of the data volume, and verifies that the RAID parity blocks are all correct. So it ensures that the data volume has full integrity, and as a side benefit acts as a drive diagnostic of sorts. I run them regularly every 16 weeks, others here run them more frequently. However, if the data volume is already known to be at risk, then you probably shouldn't run one.