RN31400 Removal of disks from abroad?

[nglshmn]

While abroad on vacation I’ve got a notification that my disk in Bay 1 has failed and my volume is now degraded. I’ve had this intermittently before and find that removing the disk and letting it rebuild is enough.

is there a way to mark a disk as removed, without physically removing it, as I’m not able to get to it? And then mark it as reinserted, so it starts to rebuild.

I’d rather do this from abroad and have it rebuild while I’m away, so that it is somewhat protected. If another disk fails while I’m away it’s so much more serious.

thanks,

Tim

[StephenB]

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@nglshmn wrote:

is there a way to mark a disk as removed, without physically removing it, as I’m not able to get to it? 

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Not that I know of.

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@nglshmn wrote:

And then mark it as reinserted, so it starts to rebuild.

I don't know how to do this either, but I wouldn't recommend doing it remotely even if it were possible.

If this were my own system, I'd replace the disk.

[nglshmn]

Well. I would if I weren’t 6000 miles away! Obviously, I’m going to do a lot more when I get back, but it’s still two weeks away......

[StephenB]

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@nglshmn wrote:

Well. I would if I weren’t 6000 miles away! Obviously, I’m going to do a lot more when I get back, but it’s still two weeks away......

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Is it possible to just shut down the NAS until you get home?

[nglshmn]

Yes, that’s my last resort if I can’t find a way to mark the disk as removed and replaced.

[Sandshark]

In this ppost Reducing-RAID-size-removing-drives-WITHOUT-DATA-LOSS-is-possible I show how to mark a drive as failed and then remove it from the RAID.  I was in FlexRAID at the time, so the NAS did not attempt to re-add it on it's onw.  I'm not sure if it would in XRAID.  If it doesn't, you can manually add the drive to the volume using the information I listed here: How-to-do-incremental-vertical-expansion-in-FlexRAID-mode.

Things will be slightly different for your case, but these should provide you with the basics.

Of course, you do run the risk that the drive will be unable to be re-added and another drive will fail during the attempt, causing you to tose the entire volume (assuming RAID5).

[StephenB]

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@Sandshark wrote:

I was in FlexRAID at the time, so the NAS did not attempt to re-add it on it's own.  I'm not sure if it would in XRAID. 

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He could just switch to FlexRAID first. 

[Sandshark]

Switching to FlexRAID, then using my method to "remove" the drive, then switching XRAID back on would likely do it.  But, be warned:  If you have a volume consisting of more than one layer, you cannot switch back to XRAID.