I have an NV+ Running 4 Seagate ST31000528AS Drives, giving me 2743 GB in a X-RAID setup. And currently using 1808 GB of it. One of the drives (Disk 1) had a growing re-allocation sector size that had approached 25 - 30 and I bought a new drive and was going to install it and it quit growing. Then about 4 months later it started growing again, about once a week or so. And now it is up to about 94 reallocations.
I han't done a backup on a while, so I hooked up an USB 2.0 1.5 TB drive, which of course isn't large enough, so I had do use RSYNC with exclusions to do the backup. The first time I tried, I did it from the SSH shell. It ran about 3 days and backed up 300 GB of data before my NV+ Locked up where I could do nothing except ping it. So I had no choice but a hard shut down. It came back up and did a re-sync and then Disk 3 went from 0 reallocations to almost 47429 + reallocations! So I configured the RSYNC backup inside the readynas backup itself and did the backup there.
Again it locked up after a day this time, and sat there a while as I was away, when I came back, I did a hard-reset again, when it came up this time, the re-allocation count on Disk 1 was 94, Disk 3 went WAY down to 160 and Disk 2 started showing allocations a few allocations as well, but is now showing 0 in the smart test in FrontView. I let it sit and now Disk 3 is back up to 14083 in the logs but a smart test in FrontView shows 160, Disk 1 is still 94 in FrontView.
The backup still did not finish, and I am now worried that this thing will all fail at once with a multi-disk failure and I am not sure if I should replace Disk 1 or 3 now since 3 is rising so fast, or if it is actually doing that and am I getting false positives?
Reallocated sectors are saved in the drive, not the NAS, so a reset shouldn't zero the counts. So something strange is happening, it is worth confirming the SMART stats on another system.
Try powering down the NAS, removing the drive, and testing it with seatools on a PC. You can also read the SMART stats with Acronis Drive Monitor.
First, never use rsync to do an initial backup, it is way too slow. It's strength is that it synchronizes the changed portion of a file between two devices. The process of checking each and every file is exceedingly slow when there are no files on the other end. When using rsync between two NAS units, it is recommended that the first backup be done using NFS not rsync and then change the type to rsync and run it again to verify the backup. It typically only takes a few minutes for rsync to run in this mode.
I would recommend in your situation that you use copy/paste to do the backup in smaller batches so as to not stress the drives and the NV+. I would start with the folders containing the most critical information first. Typically this is financial information and family photos/videos which cannot be replaced, and then work to the files that are less critical and/or may exist in other locations.
@StephenB, Thank you, I am currently out of town, but will check this weekend. Have not received any email warnings yet about any further drive issues.
@PapaBear, i was wondering if I was overwhelming the system, when the RSYNC started, the cpu seemed ok, which is why I left it alone, but disks were probably thrashing. I believe it has copied my wifes most important stuff over already with the RSYNC before it died :). So looks like I need to finish it up via Windows File Copy through a remote machine to slow it down a bit. I think I have a directory sync tool that I can use with a couple mounted SMB Drives. Afterwards though, you think the RSYNC will work, once I have all the data over there.
