Please help my volume is dead after replacing HDD

[tommychan]

Enviroment: 

Disk 1,2,3,4 - 3TB HDD

Disk 5 - 4TB HDD

Raid mode - XRAID2

My NAS report that disk 3 was detected increasing pending sector, and gave me a warning message of "Volume data is degraded". 

I then swap disk 3 with a brand new 4TB HDD, and then the system automatically RESYNC the volume data. The process has completed, I received a system message for the confirmation.

Then shortly after, I received another message saying "Disk in channel 2 (Internal) changed state from ONLINE to FAILED" and "Volume data health changed from Degraded to Dead."  

I tried to reboot the machine, swap back the old hdd and now the system says there's no volume in the machine and tell me to remove inactive volumes to use the disks. What can I do now? I do have backups but I run backup once every 6 months. So now I am risking the changes for the last few months.

Thanks very much

Tommy

[StephenB · Accepted solution]

From the sound of it, you need data recovery.

Options include using Netgear's data recovery service ( https://kb.netgear.com/69/ReadyNAS-Data-Recovery-Diagnostics-Scope-of-Service ) or ReclaiMe software.  The latter will require you to connect your drives to a Windows PC (either with SATA or a USB dock of some kind).

[StephenB · Accepted solution]

From the sound of it, you need data recovery.

Options include using Netgear's data recovery service ( https://kb.netgear.com/69/ReadyNAS-Data-Recovery-Diagnostics-Scope-of-Service ) or ReclaiMe software.  The latter will require you to connect your drives to a Windows PC (either with SATA or a USB dock of some kind).

[tommychan]

Thank you for the reply! Still, I want to know what has happened? Was I wrong to replace with a harddisk in a different size?

[Sandshark]

Did you already have a mix of drive sizes?  If you did, then you may have been looking at a re-sync and then an expansion, and the second error occurred during the expansion.  Re-sync and expansion are drive intensive.  So, if a drive is already close to failure, failure at that time is a very real possibility.  That's why it's best to make sure your backup is up to date before replacing a drive.

Using a larger drive was not wrong.  In fact, it was smart, giving you at least the potential for adding space with the next replacement if not more now because this is the second (or more) larger drive.

Putting the old drive back in was a bad move.  It was out of sync with the other three, so can't be put back in without needing a re-sync.  But in your case, I think the volume was lost before you did it.