I got home from vacation yesterday, walked into my office and noticed my NAS said C volume was unprotected. I logged into the interface and it reported that Disk1 was dead. "Ok", I thought. I'll head to the store tomorrow and buy a new drive.
My NAS is configured to auto power off at night so it shut off last night. When I powered it up this morning, Disk1 still said it was dead, Disk2 reported ok, and Disks 3-6 were reporting dead (yikes!). Yet, vol C is still online and I can access all my data. I just rebooted it and I'm running an offline disk check.
I'm definitely planning to go pick up a new drive today as I assume at the very least there must be a problem with a disk (the original Disk1), but I'm unsure where to go from here. Wait and see what the disk test comes up with?
What drives are you using? Some drives ("green" ones being the most notoroius, especially if mixed with others) can do that. When mine did that, I took each drive out and then re-inseted it (hot), and each was re-synced into the array and said it was good. But it didn't last. At that time the "Jedi" were active on the forum and they had me try some things, but nothing seemed to help for long. Ultimately, I did a factory default and restored my backup.
After that, I disabled disk spin-down, as the problem usually happened immediately upon spin-up, and the problem never recurred. I'm now running OS6 on it, and have not had the problem. But I also moved those drives to a backup NAS that's only on an hour three times a week.
I should have mentioned. I'm using WD Red drives, which as far as I understand are built for NAS systems. Either way, this is the first issue I've had with them. They've been running for a little over 3 years now without issue.
The warranty is 3 years. The average life of consumer drives (across models and manufacturers) is about 6 years (per BackBlaze).
The WDC Red drive line was launched 4 years ago (July 2012). Of the 11 WDC Reds I have installed in various NAS, I've seen only one failure. I have 5 WD30EFRX installed in my pro-6 that are between 3 1/2 and 4 years old.
I suggested contacting support because of the false "dead drive" reports in frontview. Clearly the drives aren't dead, since the data is accessible.
Thanks StephenB. WD30EFRX are exactly what I have in my unit. I haven't seen a single SMART alert or SMART stat on any drive that would cause concern, I do periodically check on them.
As you suggested I contacted support. They were able to verify the unit does not in fact see disk 1, but it does see 2-6 despite the false disk alerts and obviously the volume is still intact. I didn't make it to a store today to buy a drive (yep, should have had one on hand) but will pick one up tomorrow and replace disk 1 as they suggested.
I seem to be back up and running 100% healthy. I'll provide a brief summarization to see if anyone can shed some light.
At the suggestion of Netgear support, I replaced disk 1. The rebuild took about 8 hours or so. Afterwards, the volume of course was still intact, but the UI still said that disk 1 was dead, along with disk 4, 5 and 6. It was late so I went to bed.
This morning I was at work and logged into the unit to check on the health. Now it reported that disk 1 was healthy. So disks 1, 2 and 3 all healthy, 4, 5 and 6 dead. I rebooted the unit and when it came back up 4 was healthy, but not 5 and 6. Hmmm. So I rebooted it again and when it came back up 5 was healthy lol. Thinking I could not possibly be that lucky I gave it one more reboot and all 6 drives were reporting healthy.
Obviously something with the NAS software went sideways? I also tested the original disk 1 in my desktop with WD's tools, ran quick and extensive tests that took hours and it turned up zero issues. I won't use this disk in my NAS obviously but may as well throw it in my desktop for scratch/temp storage.
My question now is how do I know all is well? Should I escalate further with support to determine what happened? I had been contemplating on doing an OS reinstall. Could there be an issue with the current install that may have caused this and would a reinstall even help?
My question now is how do I know all is well? Should I escalate further with support to determine what happened? I had been contemplating on doing an OS reinstall. Could there be an issue with the current install that may have caused this and would a reinstall even help?
Something definitely went sideways. It would be useful to get more information on what - you could try pm'ing @mdgm-ntgr or @Skywalker and see if the logs would be of interest. I suspect the issue on disk 1 might also have been a false alarm.
I don't think an OS reinstall will accomplish anything useful. I think I'd try a volume scrub (after updating your backup).
