NAS problems

[Demon Cleaner]

One disk on my Synology 2413+ started with bad sector counts some time ago, and since 3 days it gives me I/O errors.

I get an health report every first day of the month, and since the 1.08.2014, disk 1 has 1 bad sector count.


Disk1:
Disk Reconnection Count 0
Bad Sector Count 1
Disk Re-identification Count 0

I thought that it might be not so bad, and it also stayed like this for a while. But in the health report of January this year, the bad sector count had increased to 50. One month later it was at 83, where it stalled until this day.

Unfortunately since last Saturday I also get I/O errors from that disk, and that once a day:

Dear user,

The hard disk 1 on Synology2413 had an I/O error, but it is working properly now after several retries. It might have been caused by bad sectors. If this error occurs again, please back up your data and run the S.M.A.R.T. test on your hard drive to examine the hard drive status.

Sincerely,
Synology DiskStation

S.M.A.R.T. test is normal and doesn't show anything unusual, status is green.

As the bad sectors get locked, and at the moment the count is not increasing, should I be worried? Do you think I should change the disk anyway?

You know that I'm running the NAS as one single volume in Raid 6 mode. Could I also use f.ex. a WD Red disk as replacement, as I'm using 12 x 4TB Hitachi Deskstar™ 5K4000 (HDS5C4040ALE630), which are not available anymore, does that matter?

Here's an excerpt of my log file:

http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y184/cioprgr/Capture_zpsfdzm78jl.jpg (http://s5.photobucket.com/user/cioprgr/media/Capture_zpsfdzm78jl.jpg.html)

[Harrison]

I would definitely swap the disk with a new one if possible as it is slowly signalling failure. I think as long as the replacement drive is the same size it should be fine and just rebuild the set and reintegrate the disk into the set. With RAID 6 if you take the disk out the NAS set should function OK until the new disk is ready.

How old is the drive? Most drives have 3-5 year warranties.

[Kin Hell]

Golden rule for ANY hard drive showing bad tracks or sectors is quite simple. Bin it & replace it asap.

What actually causes the bad sectors are bits of the ceramic platter/s coming away from the rest of the surface. These bits are always floating around inside the hard drive & are just waiting to start even more carnage. They get dragged across the platters during normal access procedures on the heads causing the continuous damage.

It really does not matter what mode the drive is configured in. Throw it in the bin or return it under warranty if applicable. :thumbs:

Also, S.M.A.R.T. isn't always as clever as it claims to be. It is a burden on your systems performance too, as it's always looking for problems. I never run S.M.A.R.T. on my systems as you'll know when something is wrong when trying to access the drive either on read or writes. Modern NAS boxes will give you an audible Beep, tho' S.M.A.R.T. isn't detrimental to NAS boxes like Windows based PC's are.

Reads might read okay but then you might have an issue when accessing the file/s just read. (usually corruption)
Writes will give you an instant I/O error every time.

Also on a personal note, I would not be running Hitachi Death Star Hard Drives in a NAS box & more so in a computer in any instance. They were good in the early days of low storage sizes: 20GB or < & went tits up when Maxtor came out with lower than 1" profile 40GB 3.5" HD's.

One good thing here is you're finally getting rid of one Death Star hard drive. They could be beyond their service limit & hopefully not available anymore. Hitachi Hard Drives are the worst hard drives you could ever run in a computer. They probably only did this well cos of the 5400rpm. The 7200's were nothing short of Nasty & their fail rate when in any RAID mode is alarmingly high from my personal experiences & close colleagues. :thumbsdown2:

For your NAS box, pull them all & replace with WD Red immediately. Pro Red's are not necessary.

[Harrison]

Those drives were most likely actually manufactured my WD as they purchased the Hitachi 3.5" HDD business a long time ago, but have now since sold it on again to Toshiba, hence the reason the drives are no longer available.


For your NAS box, pull them all & replace with WD Red immediately

That would be very expensive for DC to do considering his NAS has 12x 4TB disks in it.

WD Reds are definitely the way to go though and I would recommend replacing them with them as they fail/start showing errors.

[Demon Cleaner]

Have to check tonight when I bought the NAS and the drives, maybe I will have a look in the forum, must be a thread about it. I guess they're 2-3 years old (according to the forum, I ordered it the 10th of September 2013, so still warranty).

I never had any problems with my Hitachi HDDs in my Qnap, which I sold to my friend here at work, and I just asked him, and they're still running fine.

Problem is that I heard that the new disk needs to be at least as big as the old one, it must have exact the same amount of sectors. The Hitachi is 3726.02GB but I guess I have to find a datasheet to check about the sectors (EDIT: The Hitachi datasheet doesn't show it).

WD Red has 7,814,037,168 sectors.

- - - Updated - - -

Other question.

As there's warranty on the disk, could I take it out, send it in, wait for replacement, and if I get it back, build it in again? Would the NAS during this time then run in Raid 5 mode?

[Harrison]

With Raid 6 you can suffer a maximum of 2 concurrant drive failures and still maintain the integrity of the array. Therefore taking a single disk out of the array would keep it working. As for it being reduced to Raid 5, in as much as only 1 more drive can fail and the raid array stays intact is correct, so in that regard it would act just like Raid 5.

One thing you could have done with a 12 bay NAS is set 1 or 2 drives aside as hot swappable spares, so they could come into action as soon as a drive fails.

[Demon Cleaner]

I considered doing the hot swap when I set up the NAS, but in the end I decided to go with a normal Raid 6.

[Harrison]

I suppose the downside of hot swap drives is you lose the 8TB of space the 2 drives provide. It depends how much redundancy you want I suppose.

Storage is never fall proof or 100% safe is it. Backups are still the safest way to protect data, but even they can fail. When will someone invent a 100% safe backup media?

[Kin Hell]

@ DC

Fully appreciate where you are with the Sector thing & again I'll add....that's very poor of the Hitachi Hard drives.

I have a 4 bay Qnap which use to have 4 x 3TB Seagate Barracuda's in there. I run two of them as JBOD's & the other two in RAID 1.
I acquired the device like this from a close friend who also had one for himself. About 12 weeks ago, one of my Barracuda's failed & thankfully it was one of the RAID 1 drives.
Went & bought a 3TB WD Red, popped it in, updated the drive management, the NAS box did it's thing & re-built the array.

If Hitachi drives are not sticking to Industry standards, it would appear you are in a never ending cycle of using their drives & what are you going to do when they are no longer available?

Might be an Idea to jump ship now so to speak. Lets say you got a WD Red, could you transfer data from one of your Stand-alone Hitachi's to the WD Red & then throw the donor Hitachi back into your RAID config?

Not sure your RAID config will allow this, but just a thought fella. :thumbs:

PS. My close friend's identical NAS box killed all 4 of his Barracuda's in 5 days after mine died. He was not a happy chappy to say the least. :lol:

/Kin hopes this story doesn't soon destroy his remaining 3 Barracudas...... :unsure:

[Demon Cleaner]

Went & bought a 3TB WD Red, popped it in, updated the drive management, the NAS box did it's thing & re-built the array.

If Hitachi drives are not sticking to Industry standards, it would appear you are in a never ending cycle of using their drives & what are you going to do when they are no longer available?
I didn't mean this only with the Hitachi disks, but I thought this was a COMMON problem? I mean a common NAS problem, not related to the disks.

One guy from the Synology forum told me just to order one WD Red, pop it in, and if it doesn't work, just send it back. I didn't want to do that, as I think that's crazy, not gonna order to try out something, I wanna know for sure in advance.

[Harrison]

In order to work the drives need to be as big or bigger, correct? If you are unsure regarding 4TB Reds the what about getting a 6TB one?

[Kin Hell]

@ DC

Ahhhh! - I wasn't aware of this NAS box problem & tbh, I'd rate Synology over Qnap if only for the chassis design.

I'd still be trying a WD Red. ;) :thumbs:

[Demon Cleaner]

In order to work the drives need to be as big or bigger, correct? If you are unsure regarding 4TB Reds the what about getting a 6TB one?
Why would I pay more for a 6TB which will not be used by the NAS anyway? If in the coming years I would then change disks, I would always get 6TB ones, and I would end up in years having 12x6TB disks?

@Kin Hell
You still don't get what I mean :)

I heard that NAS (in common, any brand in the world) would have problems recognizing disks which are smaller than all the others in use. That's why I mentioned the 3726.02GB. If I buy a disk which f.ex. has physically 3699.50GB, it would be a problem for any NAS, as that disk is smaller, not 2TB smaller, but just a bit smaller than ALL the others. But then I read that it's not necessarily the size that matters, but the sectors. If that differs too much, a NAS might have problems with it, thus the best would be to get the exact same disk model, just to be on the safe side.

[Harrison]

As WD probably manufactured your Hitachi drives they are most likely to be the most similar in terms of sector size and overall formatted storage allocation. If you can't find the information on sectors for your existing drives to compare there should be data sheets somewhere online for them. An alternative could be for you to try to directly contact WD or Toshiba (the new owners of Hitachi brand) and see if they can provide the information. Companies will normally be very helpful if you make up a good story such as a need to replace drives in a lot of NAS units (so they start to get interested in a potential bulk order).

[Kin Hell]

@ DC

Just try a WD Red. ;)

[Demon Cleaner]

New disk is in, rebuilt is running.

Got the same disk like the ones I have for 120€, so I just took that one, and I also send my damaged one to HGST today, warranty is valid until the 29.06.2015, so I might me pretty lucky. If I get it replaced, then I will have one "on stock".

Btw, I checked the sectors for the Hitachi, it says on the label on the disk itself, and it has the exact same amount than the WD Red, not one single sector more or less, so basically these seem to be very similar or even same disks?

[Harrison]

They won't be the same disk because of how the Red drives are manufactures for extended always on up time specifically for NAS use, but in general I would have guessed sectors would be the same on the same size drives, and even more so considering Hitachi drives were manufactured by WD until they sold them on to Toshiba.

BTW, was it an old stock drive you managed to get then, as I thought they were no longer made?

[Demon Cleaner]

A bit more than 1 year old, has 15000 hours power-on time, just like all of mine.

[Harrison]

Really. I would only want brand new drives in a nas.

[Demon Cleaner]

Well, a brand new one could be damaged too, already saw that many times, when f.ex. it's not well packed when they ship it. At least this one was running fine, so I know it's not broken. It has 15000 hours "only", with a lifespan of 1000000 hours, that's 1.5% of its life.

[Kin Hell]

Hard drives can have some funny hiccups @ all times of their service life. I perhaps consider myself lucky to have had 3 x 500GB Seagate Barracudas running in RAID0 for 5 years now....

I've had a brand new 2TB Barracuda spin up & Die whilst formatting..... the replacement lasted a week so I bought a 3TB WD Red instead & it's been fine since.

@ DC

Glad you got sorted in the end fella. Fingers crossed for you getting the old drive fixed under warranty. - Nice one! :thumbs:

[Demon Cleaner]

Got a reply from HGST. As they don't have these disks anymore, they proposed to send me a G-Drive external HDD as replacement. I agreed. Anyone knowing these ones? Amazon sells them for 164£.

http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-drive-usb

[Harrison]

I've not heard of them, but I like the case design. Could be handy for something like console backups?

Sent from my SM-T520 using Tapatalk

[Demon Cleaner]

I think I'm just gonna sell it straight away, as I don't need it.

[Harrison]

Good idea. If still sealed in the box it will be worth more to resell too.

[Kin Hell]

Yeah, same here with no user base knowledge either.

However, it is raved about in several places & is aimed at the MAC sector.

Perhaps it might be worth hanging on to until you have read a bit more. Check this review out & there are loads in Google. :thumbs:

http://9to5mac.com/2014/12/30/review-g-technologys-g-drive-usb/