Sudden "degrading" of two WD drivers in a Synology NAS???

StevieP

StevieP

StevieP

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I've just spent most of the evening trying to help a mate out after his Synology DS214Play NAS stopped being recognised on his network!

Basically he's changed ISP a couple of days ago and following the change of router (from a BT Hub to the Sky Hub) his NAS couldn't be detected on the network.

Anyway, he turned it off and back on and all he gets now is a constant beeping with nothing showing on the network still.

We've taken one of the drives out, performed a reset and can now log in via DSM - where it's telling him that the drives (we've tried both individually now) have "degraded" and need replacing!?!?! (and the constant beeping indicates this apparently!)

I find it had to believe that both drives have all of a sudden "degraded" just when he's changed router - just seems to be too much of a coincidence for my money!

At least he can recover all of his data but once that's done I'm not sure what the best next step is - is it worth trying a full reset/format to see if it changes anything or is it simply a case of winging them off to Western Digital for them to confirm they have gone bang and (hopefully) replace them? (they are WD Red's which from memory have a 3-year guarantee??)

Thanks for any suggestions guys....
 
on the DSM with both drives connected does it show both disks as degraded or just the 1? (picture I found online not mine or anything)

hdd_ssd.png
 
My mate is just copying some data from the drive while it's sort of working so will have a look with both drives in after that!
 
He does in that the NAS has 2 drives in RAID but he'd feel better backing up some data before messing around with the drives!
 
bledd. said:
Two drives in raid isn't a backup.
Click to expand...

Belief system crushed.

I was always under the impression that 2 drives in a NAS with the same data written to both gave you a degree of security with one being a backup of the other!?!?!

Granted I've never looked into it in any great amount of detail but that was my understanding of the Synology Hybrid Raid setup!
 
StevieP said:
Belief system crushed.

I was always under the impression that 2 drives in a NAS with the same data written to both gave you a degree of security with one being a backup of the other!?!?!

Granted I've never looked into it in any great amount of detail but that was my understanding of the Synology Hybrid Raid setup!
Click to expand...
RAID protects you against physical disk failure. It doesn't protect you against human error (accidentally deleting or overwriting something), data corruption, etc.
 
RAID is Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks - it only provides redundancy - see redundancy as up-time/accessibility

Backup is life a separate copy of a file/program/document/vm ect.

With the RAID 1 can you see two copies of anything? Nope, because although physically you know there are two copies, logically you are presented with one. In RAID 1 you are (and all raids) only protected against a disk suddenly dying, and the number of disks depends on your raid. If the death of a disk is caused by a faulty firmware update that causes error writes to your raid array, you have useless data on both drives

Backup is 3 - 2 - 1
3: Copies of the file (Primary location Backup1 Backup2)
2: Different forms of storage (this is enterprise only imo as tape drives/optical media no way for home)
1: Offsite backup

In practice conforming to all backup best practices is almost impossible to the avg joe but a fair few can be ticked off to give the solution you need :)
 
Thanks for the lesson guys - in practice I'm in a similar position to my mate in that I have a Synology NAS with 2 HDD's running "Synoology Hybrid RAID" - which I've always looked on as 2 copies of the same data in case one of the hard drives failed!

The only addition to this is I have a portable 1TB drive that I keep separate of all the family photos and videos etc (ie. the content that I simply never want to lose!) and the idea was originally to keep this extra backup at my parents house so if there is a fire or similar at home, at least we haven't lost everything! (although in practice it's failed to leave the house yet as I've not got round to it!)

I appreciate the whole system/firmware complication that could leave both HDD's useless but it's the best I can muster at the moment!

Anyway, this issue aside, do we think anything can be done with his degraded drives or is that pretty much it in terms of what to do next?
 
Sounds like you have got the drives out and have tried to read off the data. Once you have what you can get then you can use SMART to check for any key errors. If both drives have unrecoverable errors and fails in the SMART then those drives are dead/dying and need to be replaced.

Try to find out the route cause of the failure and replace the files. In terms of Data Backup. For my families stuff we set up one NAS with RAID 5 so that we all have our own space and redundancy since some of our house systems and work stuff run on it. We have all personal data backed up to a cloud backup (less than 1TB so no real cost). I have a Backup USB3 Drive on the NAS that performs Backup of the NAS. This supplies our 3-2-1 enough and provides uptime so my sister doesn't bug me that she cant access her stuff at 1AM again
 
I had one of my WD Red's become 'degraded' in my old Synology NAS, it was basically one of the SMART tests going above the threshold. I contacted WD, and they advised me to return the drive under it's warranty, it was replaced and all was well.

So - do some SMART tests and see what the numbers are. These should be scheduled anyway in order to avoid surprises.

Get a big USB 3 external drive and get some local backups scheduled, you're basically covered then.
 
StevieP said:
Belief system crushed.
Click to expand...

You have a RAID.

Delete a file from the volume.

The file is now gone and you have no other copies.

RAID isn't a backup.

It protects you from (single) disk failures only. (assuming you have RAID1/2/3/4/5/6/10 etc and not RAID0)
 
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