by To some of you this may be a trivial thing but for me it is like finding that extra money in your wallet or even hitting the lottery. Some of you may know I am a single sysadmin shop. I do have other sysdmins in my Department but I am actually on my own to handle my legacy SCO Boxes as well as my LINUX boxes. My experience with RAID systems has not been favorable. The first one I ever dealt with was a RAID 5 system that had a drive go bad and when I replaced the drive (after a long search to find an exact replacement) found that it was never setup properly and did not automatically repair itself. So the next system I setup came in with the RAID system setup and two weeks after it was setup I had a Drive go south. I got a replacement the next morning, did the Hot Swap and the rebuild process kicked off. WOOT! that was great. Until recently when a Synology NAS unit decided to go belly up. I was struggling to quickly find a replacement as this device was not under any major support contract. The unit drove me nuts and I figured all was lost. It gave all signs the Motherboard was gone. Anyway I found a replacement drive and installed it. I expected the system to see it and kick off the repair but that wasn’t happening. All I saw was a Degraded notification and a constant beeping sound. If anyone has used a Synology they will know that documentation is not this company’s strong point. So as i fumbled through the many screens in the Manager I find that one little button that says to repair. I clicked it and it started doing its thing. Sad part it took almost 20 hours to rebuild a 2TB Raid system under Synology’s SHR Raid system. I wasn’t sure if I was going to even see my data. I was like a kid on Christmas that got that BB gun when I logged in this morning and saw all of my data restored.
As a lesson learned I made sure I ordered a spare drive for a new system we spun up which means that by the time I need that drive as a replacement I will be replacing the unit due to age.
I guess the moral to this story is that RAID will work but with the large amount of Data we store today you have to be very patient when rebuilding a system