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ranchracer's avatar
ranchracer
Aspirant
Dec 14, 2019

RN214 Major Failure

Well, the day everyone fears seems to have hit me. I've been running my RN214 with two 4TB and two 6TB drives (slots 1-4 respectively) running in default X-RAID configuration. Today I noticed a huge slow down in performance accessing the network volume from my MAC so I logged in to check the drives and the system was showing green for slots 1, 3, and 4 but showing no drive in slot 2. Status was "data degraded". 

 

I popped out the drive in slot two and replaced it with a brand new 6TB drive (matching the drives in slots 3 and 4) that I had on hand. Still was not showing a drive in slot two so I rebooted the system. Once it came back up the status was the same, so I tried swapping the drives in slots 1 and 2, still no joy so I swapped them back. 

 

The system was now showing an issue with the drive in slot 1 and an error was telling me to "remove inactive volumes to use the disk. Disk 1". At this point I powered down the system and reseated all of the drives. I also put the original 4TB drive back in slot 2 so I was basically back to the original configuration.

 

Upon powering back up it is now showing all four drives as red and telling me there are no volumes configured so I'm unable to see ANY data on the system at this point. I've been paying for ReadyNAS Vault only to realize tonight that it hasn't been backing up this entire time, so I do not have a backup of the data in the cloud. 

 

I have no idea if it's even possible to recover my data at this point. Basically my entire life is on this thing and I guess I had the mistaken belief that four disks in a RAID 5 configuration was pretty bullet proof. I've attached a screenshot of the disk status. Am I royally boned here? Is there ANY way to recover this situation?

3 Replies

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  • Oh and just FYI, prior to this nightmare situation I was only utilizing less than 2TB total on the original volume. Most of it was free so it wasn't a situation of maxing out the storage space.

  • StephenB's avatar
    StephenB
    Guru - Experienced User

    ranchracer wrote:

    , so I tried swapping the drives in slots 1 and 2, still no joy so I swapped them back. 

     


    Did you do this with the system running?

     


    ranchracer wrote:

     

    Upon powering back up it is now showing all four drives as red and telling me there are no volumes configured so I'm unable to see ANY data on the system at this point.


    The RAID array is out-of-sync - somewhere along the journey you ended up with lost writes to the array.

     

    Options are to

    • ranchracer's avatar
      ranchracer
      Aspirant

      Thanks. Bought all the bits needed to connect the drives to the PC and give this a try.

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