NASLite Network Attached Storage

I would really like to hear from anyone who had experienced a drive failure in a RAID 5 array under Naslite 2, especially if they had a 3ware card.

I seem to have a failed drive which is part of a 4 drive RAID 5 array. However it looks like all the data is inaccessible, which defeats the point of the array.

I am therefore interested in the reliability of RAID 5 in actual examples of real life drive failures. Is it safer to use RAID 0+1 (10)?

Is the problem related to the 3ware card? Mine is a 12 port SATA, I think it's an 8500.

Well, I've bought a replacement drive and substituted it for the bad one.

The 3ware bios detected the change and offered to rebuild the degraded array. I have to laugh at "degraded" as it is totally stuffed! 3ware said rebuild will happen after pressing F8. This booted to Naslite2, which is now stuck on "Checking storage filesystem" for a few hours.

I thought that NL should be able to access the degraded array, and it should also access my other, normal array. [hint]It would be really nice if Ralph or Tony would actually comment [/hint].

Cheers.

That sounds really bad!

I had a drive failure a few months ago on my 3ware 7500-8.
The array was degraded for over 2 weeks before I noticed it by chances while looking at the Naslite log.

I switched the drive, rebuilt the array and all is fine....

I should add that I rebuilt the array in the BIOS util and did wait for it to finish there before allowing the boot process to continue.

It was all transparent to Naslite.

I read your other related posts and it could be that your particular board has problems.

Thanks for responding ALucas. I think my card is 8506, in any case it has 12 SATA ports. I tried the 3ware site for a firmware upgrade, but it was v 7.xxx which had no correlation to what my card displays.

The bios says "rebuild after F8", but when I press F8, it exits the bios and starts NL. There is no indication of the percentage of rebuild, or if it is happening at all.

I bought another drive and also flashed the 3ware bios to the latest, with apparent success. However there was no visible improvements/changes in the bios, except the version number, so presumably the changes were fixes under the covers.

Left the array in REBUILD mode for nearly 24 hrs at the end of which there was still no indication of progress or success.

I then decided to discard any hope of saving the data, as I had a recent backup anyway, so moved the second set of 4 drive cables to ports 8-11 instead of 4-7, in case there was something funny with the card. The bios detected the existing "degraded" array and nothing had improved.

I then put back the original drive on the assumption that perhaps it was not a h/w drive issue, and deleted array #2, and then created a RAID 10 instead. This went well, and as there is no initializing involved, the second array was up in a moment. NL2 found it and formatted it with no errors.

As this is an opportunity for testing without further loss, I then decided the delete the RAID 10 array, and again create a RAID 5 instead. As the drives were wiped, the bios went ahead creating the RAID 5, as though nothing wrong had happened before, and as I am writing this, is initializing. 15% done so far in the time it took to write this.

My plan is to add the extra drive bought yesterday, as a hot spare and copy some stuff to the re-created array. Run it for a few days then unplug a drive and see what happens.

Meanwhile I am hoping someone will answer my questionon the NL2 CDD forum on how to patch the CD so I can bring up my other Dell/Adaptec based NAS box.

- never a dull moment -[/url]

I use Magiciso to edit existing iso files, but i'm sure there are are also other ways.