How to replace failing Disk 1?

Any 500GB drive or larger that is on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) can be used. The limitation is that the drive must be equal in size or larger than the current drive. If you purchased the NV+ with the two drives, considering the time frame in which you made your purchase, they are probably Enterprise class drives with a 5 year warranty and Rotational Vibration Safeguard which is critical in arrays of large number of drives (such as the 4200 rack mount with 12 drives) but is less important in small arrays such as yours. Some feel the extra money is worthwhile, while others point out that the higher priced drives will fail as well. (All drives fail, it is a question of when).

You can look in Frontview -> Status -> Health to see the list of drives, click on the Smart+ button to see the detailed list of statistics as well as the make and model of the drive and serial number. While I like, if possible to have a matched set of drives, it is unnecessary and I now have two NAS units with two different sizes and brand of drives. Another member pointed out that 500GB drives that are on the NV+ HCL are getting hard to find and I pointed out to him that it may be a time to start the upgrade to 1TB or even 2TB drives. It is unfortunate that the current prices are elevated because of the flooding in Thailand.

If you replace the 500GB drive with a larger drive only 500GB of the capacity will be used by the array until all drives are equal to or larger than the drive you install. The procedure is to hot pull the failing drive, wait for the NV+ to recognize that the drive has been pulled (on the front panel, you will be first told the drive has failed, then it will be reported as dead and finally as missing) and then hot add the new drive. You can shut it down, remove the failed drive, install the new drive and reboot. This will, however, require the drive to have no data or partitions on it.

Please make sure that you have a current and complete backup of all your data (of course you maintain one anyway) as the resync process will put a lot of strain on the other drive with constant activity for 5-8 hours. If this drive fails during the resync process, the array will be gone (with the data).

NV+ supports hot swap.

Boot the array and either force a rsync view the front view or just yank #1 (paper click in earlier models is necessary) and screw in a new drive and push it home. The sync should happen automatically...

The critical thing is to not do anything major with the machine until the swap is completed. If any of the other 3 drives fail, you will loose data.

I recall reading a study by google 2% chance for a double failure in raid array (2 failling at once) but I feel like it jumps to 9 if you let the array continue to run on just 3.

Scaevola wrote:

NV+ supports hot swap. Boot the array and either force a rsync view the front view or just yank #1 (paper click in earlier models is necessary) and screw in a new drive and push it home. The sync should happen automatically... The critical thing is to not do anything major with the machine until the swap is completed. If any of the other 3 drives fail, you will loose data. I recall reading a study by google 2% chance for a double failure in raid array (2 failling at once) but I feel like it jumps to 9 if you let the array continue to run on just 3.

Just to clarify, there are only 2 hard drives in the unit. It was set up in a Raid 1 configuration. That wasn't my doing. The person that set it up decided not use the X-Raid. So will that complicate things? Since its Disk 1 that is going bad, will I be able to hot pull Disk 1 out and just put the new drive in or will I have to power down first. And will the Readynas boot back up with a now blank Disk 1? My thinking is that the Disk 1 bay is where the boot drive has to reside and Disk 2 is the mirror so I thought Disk 1 had to contain the boot files and setting in order to boot the Readynas which is why I thought I had to move Disk 2 into the Disk 1 bay and put the new empty hard drive into the the Disk 2 bay, boot it up and then the unit will sync with the now blank Disk 2. Am I wrong?

Thanks,
Adam

amn0270 wrote:
Since its Disk 1 that is going bad, will I be able to hot pull Disk 1 out and just put the new drive in

Yes.

amn0270 wrote:
My thinking is that the Disk 1 bay is where the boot drive has to reside and Disk 2 is the mirror so I thought Disk 1 had to contain the boot files and setting in order to boot the Readynas which is why I thought I had to move Disk 2 into the Disk 1 bay and put the new empty hard drive into the the Disk 2 bay, boot it up and then the unit will sync with the now blank Disk 2. Am I wrong?

The OS partition is mirrored across the disks, just like the data volume is. So with disk 1 going bad simply remove that disk, wait a little bit and insert the replacement disk (the time taken to remove the dead disk from the tray and insert replacement into it should be more than long enough to wait before adding the replacement disk into the NAS).