Replacing a failed drive in a Qnap box

lumencreative · 1 Oct 2014 at 14:39

One of my customers has come to me with a QNAP Nas that has a failed drive. The QNAP is a 4 bay and has 4 x 2TB WD Red drives set up as RAID 5.

I have removed the failed drive and fitted a new one, but the NAS is still running in degraded mode. We have rebooted the NAS, upgraded the firmware and removed and reinserted the new drive, but nothing seems to work. The System Logs report the new drive as failed and the drive status is 'Disk read/write error'.

I am currently running a Bad Block Scan on the new drive.

Can anyone offer any advice as I'm now wondering whether the new drive is faulty or whether the QNAP is faulty.

Thanks

lumencreative · 1 Oct 2014 at 14:48

Rroff said:
You should be able to recover the array through the storage manager.

None of the actions are available in Storage Manager because it's listing the error with the disk. QNAP say that the RAID is meant to rebuild itself when restarted with a new drive in but it's just not happening.

System logs show:

[RAID5 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4] Start Rebuilding
[RAID5 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4] Rebuilding Skipped

lumencreative · 1 Oct 2014 at 14:53

Rroff said:
The drop down list in the RAID Management tab doesn't let you use any options at all with the array selected?

It won't let me select the RAID Volume so the 'Action' drop down stays greyed out.

lumencreative · 1 Oct 2014 at 14:59

Rroff said:
Have you set the new drive as a spare?

No, I've not. I read the guidelines from QNAP and they advise to just pull the failed drive and insert the new drive and the QNAP will automatically rebuild the RAID Volume so I've not done anything with the drive other than what I've said above.

lumencreative · 1 Oct 2014 at 15:04

Thanks for that, I will google configuring the drive as a spare and go from there

lumencreative · 1 Oct 2014 at 15:47

Rroff said:
Hmm reading the docs suggests it should do it fully automatically if the array is degraded and you straight swap for an identical or higher capacity drive and if it doesn't its not seeing the drive as an appropriate replacement. Don't have that much experience with it but I know it didn't automatically do it the one time I've had to sort a member disc failure.

In Volume Management it is listing the replacement drive but showing a read/write error which makes me wonder if it failed to format the drive correctly. If the bad block scan doesn't fix it, I will pull the drive, format it in a PC and then reinsert the drive and it should hopefully reattempt the format.

FYI: The original drive was a WD Red 2TB and we have replaced it with an identical drive.

lumencreative · 1 Oct 2014 at 15:52

I must say, after having to work with the QNAP device, I am so glad I chose a Synology one for our own use

lumencreative · 2 Oct 2014 at 09:24

Quick update. Left the Bad Block Scan running overnight, got into work this morning and the system logs show:

[RAID5 Disk Volume: Drive 1 2 3 4] Add drive 1 to the volume failed.
Plugged drive failed to work.
Drive 1 plugged out.

Then in Storage Manager, it is showing HDD1 as not existing.

Now going to run WD Diagnostics on the drive.

lumencreative · 2 Oct 2014 at 14:09

nutcase_1uk said:
Faulty backplane rather than drive?

That's what I was thinking but I have tried the drive in a PC and the WD Diagnostic Utility didn't even recognize the drive, so have just swapped it out for another one. It's currently rebuilding (only just put a new drive in so still at 0%). Will see how this one goes.