#372136 - 08/07/2019 17:59
NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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I've got a couple of notification emails from my NAS stating that one of the disks is on the fritz: An I/O error occurred to drive 4 on ds416, but the drive is working properly now after several retries. But when I run an extended SMART check on the disk, it shows up fine. What's going on?
_________________________
-- roger
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#372139 - 08/07/2019 20:32
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14493
Loc: Canada
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If the drive is by Western Digital, double check the SMART data -- they tend to cheat a little there.
Otherwise, could simply be a loose/dodgy cabling connection. I have one SATA port on my server with troubles like that from time to time, and I "fixed" a drive by simply moving it to another unused port.
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#372144 - 09/07/2019 07:31
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 18/01/2000
Posts: 5683
Loc: London, UK
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If the drive is by Western Digital, double check the SMART data -- they tend to cheat a little there. It is. Here's the SMART data:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 35
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 183 175 021 Pre-fail Always - 7808
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2611
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 074 074 000 Old_age Always - 19237
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 098 098 000 Old_age Always - 2302
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 2
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 2608
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 115 110 000 Old_age Always - 37
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 200 200 000 Old_age Offline - 4
I "fixed" a drive by simply moving it to another unused port. Can't do that: no unused ports.
_________________________
-- roger
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#372145 - 09/07/2019 11:09
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14493
Loc: Canada
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SMART data does appear to be fine. None of those "pending" errors set. Since all ports are in use, your options would seem to be:
(1) replace the cable.
(2) swap physical slots with another drive in the array, and see if the error follows the drive or stays with the slot.
Cheers
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#372180 - 05/08/2019 14:39
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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Related/not related: Back in 2013, I bought two LaCie 5-disk JBOD contraptions. Now, six years later, one of them is performing flawlessly and the other had a regular issue where a disk would disconnect. Also, the power supply went out. I replace the power supply with a dodgy no-name equivalent from a Chinese manufacturer selling on Amazon. It worked. I also replaced 3x 2TB disks with 2x 3TB disks. These were running a stripe with my Time Machine backups, so no big deal. Rebuild them and we're good to go. Fast forward a month, with me out of town, and this morning I saw that one of the disks was reported as failed. Uggh. This has me suspecting that there's something wrong with the enclosure itself. I'd been hoping to delay all of this until I purchased a new machine, but maybe it's time to do that now before I have a catastrophe. FWIW, the likely new machine specs will be a Mac Mini (maxed out) with some sort of 2-disk Thunderbolt 3 enclosure: one for my "bulk" storage and one for Time Machine. Among other things, I'd been hoping that somebody would release an enclosure that matches the footprint of the Mac Mini, as they did in the old days. Right now, the closest I can seem to get, in terms of desired specs is this: https://eshop.macsales.com/item/AKiTiO/3RSAA0006Y/
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#372181 - 05/08/2019 17:12
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14493
Loc: Canada
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One problem with a LOT of these prefab drive enclosures is lack of sufficient cooling for the drives, the electronics, or both. They tend to squish the drives into tight spaces with hardly any allowance for air movement around the drives, and many of them use teensy little 2-3" fans which make impressive noises but hardly move any air.
So whatever can be done to improve air flow and/or cooling is likely to improve longevity.
Edited by mlord (05/08/2019 17:13)
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#372183 - 05/08/2019 17:47
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 20/12/1999
Posts: 31597
Loc: Seattle, WA
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Another possibility: Instead of a Mac Mini with external drives, a Synology NAS will also work as a Time Machine backup server. I've been doing that for a while and it's worked well. I do double Time Machine backups now: External USB3 drive when docked, and Synology NAS on the network. Basically, Time Machine alternates between the two.
I can't vouch for the cooling capacity of my unit, but it's been working well for quite a while with a couple of RAID drives in it. Earlier, I had a pair of dodgy drives but the RAID saved me there, and their replacement drives have been humming along just fine for quite a while, I think perhaps a couple years so far.
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#372189 - 07/08/2019 01:07
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 30/04/2000
Posts: 3810
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I used to run a fileserver, and it would be awfully tempting to go down the rabbit hole of setting up a FreeNAS system. That said, i'm generally in favor of anything that makes my life simpler these days. Direct-attached storage is pretty simple.
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#372215 - 19/08/2019 16:47
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: DWallach]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 13/02/2002
Posts: 3212
Loc: Portland, OR
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I used to run a fileserver, and it would be awfully tempting to go down the rabbit hole of setting up a FreeNAS system. I found it's not that big a rabbit hole, if you don't want it to be. I set one up about 3 and a 1/2 years ago, and until I upgraded a couple of weeks ago, hadn't touched it since. It just sits there and does its thing. Same with the one we have at my office, and that one's even older.
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#372216 - 20/08/2019 18:17
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12338
Loc: Sterling, VA
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Another vote here for a Synology. Yes, you could set up a FreeNAS but personally I have other things I want to be doing and I like not thinking about my storage device or spending much time setting it up. Mine's been running for years now and still going strong. Never had a drive problem and I think the airflow is pretty good as long as I remember to clear the dust away from the various grills.
_________________________
Matt
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#372298 - 20/09/2019 11:05
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: Roger]
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addict
Registered: 24/07/2002
Posts: 618
Loc: South London
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I was a synology user, but reached the drive limit and made the decision to move away at that point.
Built a PC and installed Unraid, it's not free and you can do it all with linux if you're so inclined for free, but I'm lazy and wanted something that would just work without me having to edit configuration files.
It's not built for high performance, but it makes up for that with the way it configures the drives, I have 2 parity drives so can cope with a couple of failures before I lose data, the thing here is that the way the drives are confgured it uses some sort of overlaid FS to combine the space across all the drives. It tries to balance file storage across all the drives.
The neat thing is, that say for example both parity drives failed and then one of the drives in the array failed, then I only lose the data on that drive, not the whole array.
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#372299 - 20/09/2019 11:27
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14493
Loc: Canada
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I'm still using the simple "roll my own" setup with mhddfs across a bunch of very large drives, with a second set of very large drives to which I periodically mirror the first set.
mhddfs does the same kind of thing as Unraid, spreading the files around evenly, and a single drive failure loses data only on that single drive. The backup array ensures I always have a complete backup, can recover anything, and without suffering long RAID-style parity rebuilds.
Either of those two methods (Unraid, mhddfs) seem to be the best solutions out there at the moment. But both, like anything else, do NOT eliminate the need for full backups.
Cheers
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#372300 - 20/09/2019 14:17
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 10/06/1999
Posts: 5916
Loc: Wivenhoe, Essex, UK
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I’m still ZFS on Ubuntu. Unlike most people though I don’t use the parity distributing raid stuff, I just have three drives in a mirror. It is of course at the expense of throwing lots of drives at the problem, but my data size is small <3TB so it doesn’t really matter.
It means I can survive two drive failure and I don’t care about rebuild times and any single drive can be pulled from the machine and taken elsewhere with all my data on it.
I am thinking of moving to the same setup using FreeNAS instead.
_________________________
Remind me to change my signature to something more interesting someday
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#372301 - 20/09/2019 15:43
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/07/1999
Posts: 5549
Loc: Ajijic, Mexico
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I guess I'm kind of old school.
Because my data changes slowly (mostly the addition of new eBooks and audio books, plus a bit of in-house accounting) and loss of the data would be annoying but not life-changing, I just run backups manually as the need arises.
One set of backups is to separate internal drives in the tower case.
Another set is to a pair of external drives sitting out on my desk.
The final set is kept off-premises and only updated every few months.
Simple, works for me, only takes a few keystrokes to do. I can fully understand why someone whose data is critically important might prefer a more robust backup system.
tanstaafl.
_________________________
"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"
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#372302 - 20/09/2019 15:48
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: Roger]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 29/08/2000
Posts: 14493
Loc: Canada
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The fancy parity-whatever systems are not backups though. So anyone doing those STILL needs to do what Doug, myself, and others here also do: full backups to a separate set of drives.
Cheers
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#372309 - 24/09/2019 00:04
Re: NAS says disk bad, but also not bad
[Re: mlord]
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carpal tunnel
Registered: 08/03/2000
Posts: 12338
Loc: Sterling, VA
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The fancy parity-whatever systems are not backups though. So anyone doing those STILL needs to do what Doug, myself, and others here also do: full backups to a separate set of drives. Absolutely. 2 locations for a file minimum. 3 or more preferred.
_________________________
Matt
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