Disaster :(

[joe567890]

I have a DS1511+ (and a 5 disk expansion unit). I use 3TB Western Digital Green hard drives, and use the SHR raid configuration. Last night disk 4 crashed. I replaced the drive, and started the "repair". When I went to sleep, it was ~2% complete. This morning I woke up, and now Disk 4 and Disk 1 have crashed. I am bummed...

Is there a preferred method to try and retain as much of my data as possible? Am I SOL? Any help and insight would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!!

[rcblackwell]

I have a DS1511+ (and a 5 disk expansion unit). I use 3TB Western Digital Green hard drives, and use the SHR raid configuration.

I can't help you with your issue however I thought I'd mention that I once had 2 x 2 TB WD Green drives in a DS209 configured as an SHR array. They worked fine for just over a year then started giving me all kinds of performance issues. Research on WD Green drives revealed they shouldn't be used in a RAID array. I can't remember for sure however I seem to recall something about the length of time these drives need to write data; the period of time is too long for RAID tolerances thus the array often fails as data isn’t committed to the drive in time. From what I understand of the problem I doubt your data is lost however someone with greater knowledge then I will need to comment on whether it would be retrievable.

Moral of the story; you may want to replace the WD Green drives with either high-end desktop or commercial drives. I replaced my WD Green drives with high-end desktop drives that are working well the moment.

[joe567890]

Update which folks might find interesting.

Synology did respond to my email, and it was within 48 hours. Not super-great, but in 2012 and the state of technology vendors, it really is not that bad. Very nice, personable and and professional response and interaction. Very pleased. I would purchase Synology (so far) with this support-model in mind.

So after an email exchange I turned my NAS back on and found I could still "read" from the crashed volume. So my offload copy is in progress (slowly....)

Of interest, The "new" Disk-4 remains invisible, I got two "I/O error" on Disk-1 overnight, and also a notice that Disk-2 had crashed (and a few "I/O error" notices).

It now seems probable to me that this is mostly a DiskStation-based event/problem. I think Disk-4 (the original, not the replaced/invisible/non-initialized Disk-4 in the NAS now) was clearly defective which was the compelling cause. But I do not think Disk-1, the new Disk-4, and now Disk-2 are defective/failed. We'll get more information after the offload when I do some SMART tests.

Do folks think my NAS unit is defective? Are there settings to mitigate the issues?

Thanks!

[abusous2000]

I urge to disable idle time on WD Green drives. It is well documented on youtube; search for WDIdel3.exe

These drives are good for the environment, therefore they were designed not for mession critical but mostly for backups, therefore they are cheep. But others reported they could be used if you disable the idle time. I bought five of those; and disabled the idle time; I am crossing my fingers it is ganna be OK.

Good luck

[maxxfi]

If you use at least DSM 3.2, the box will disable itself the idle timer on the WD Green drives,
And to be sure, it will do it again at every reboot

[Metrik]

Thank you, maxxfi. Now people can put this issue to rest.

[Wizzie]

Phew.... I just read this post and got a bit worried as I use WD Green drives in my DS411+II, but it was relieving to read DSM 3.2 onwards makes sure the known issue of the idle timer at least is not an issue anymore, as I read it.

Anyways, hope you with the crashed disks were able to save all the data to external source!

[joe567890]

It took a long time, but I did get most of the data off onto external drives. There were some damaged files, but acceptable for my usage.

The thing is that only one drive really failed, all of the other issues according to WD support were from the NAS. The NAS marked these drives as having serious SMART errors when they did not. WD support said they would be calling Synology, but I doubt that will happen in any meaningful way.

A NAS with SHR is not a backup, but the NAS itself should not introduce issues of its own. In my case it made a bad situation miserable. Replacing the one failed drive and rebuilding should have corrected the problem.

Oh well, I guess nothing is perfect...