So I have, as seen in an earlier topic realized that at least 2 disks is faulty. As I can read, raid5 means that one drive can crash but not two. Is it really possible that the drives have broken down simultaneously? Otherwise, shouldn’t the NAS send some message –“You need to replace a disk”?
Should I put new disks in the RN31400 or buy something else?
So I have, as seen in an earlier topic realized that at least 2 disks is faulty. As I can read, raid5 means that one drive can crash but not two. Is it really possible that the drives have broken down simultaneously?
One thing to keep in mind - in most cases users install identical disks at the same time. The environment and the load on the disks is also near-identical. So it is certainly possible for multiple disks to fail close in time.
A lot of files on my own NAS are only rarely accessed, and I believe that is often the case. Since generally you (and the NAS) can't tell the disk is failing until you try to read or write to the failing sectors, this can result in one disk essentially silently failing.
Did you have email alerts set up on your NAS? If you did, is it possible that they no longer worked? Note that sometimes the email alerts need to be reconfigured because the email provider changes the needed setup. Google required that a while ago with gmail.
Also, did you ever set up maintenance functions? I rotate through defrag, disk test, balance, and scrub (scheduling one of those tests each month). The scrub function also (IMO) is a good disk test, so I am essentially testing the disks every 2 months. That can help uncover disk problems earlier.
Should I put new disks in the RN31400 or buy something else?
Up to you of course. But the multiple disk problem could happen with any NAS vendor. RAID isn't enough to keep data safe, you need independent backup(s) on other devices to ensure data safety. Ideally one backup would be off-site.
