Replacing EoL Seagate 2TB HDD in RAID 5 array

[Tinuva]

I feel so much more at ease now that I've backed up 5TB of my stuff to tape. I was always on edge when the power went out or there's a kernel panic or something. Now at least I know if the raid dies then I can easily restore my files.

Luckily that becomes a non-issue for 2 reasons for me:
1. Run UPS on your fileserver that does a shutdown when the power is out and battery good. Start it back up when the power is back.
2. copy-on-write filesystems like ZFS and BTRFS does wonders if you don't have UPS backup.

A cheap UPS is all you need, to give your server 5 minutes to finish a shutdown, and most of these should last 15-20minutes on small servers.
Heck I run a seperate UPS for ADSL router and Wireless AP, so I can still use the internet during load shedding on my laptop!

Thanks for all the advice! It's much appreciated!

I've already backed up what needed to be backed up and after almost 1 day of recovery, its at 50%.

I reckon that I'll replace the 2TB drive with the Western Digital Red 2TB: http://www.takealot.com/computers/wd-red-2tb-sata-6-gb-s-nas-drive,29924902
... or do you guys perhaps know of a better (and semi-affordable) 2TB+ drive for long term use?

The 2TB WD reds are great drives. I used to run 2x 3TB WD Reds, which I sold on carbonite. Currently I run 6x 4TB WD Reds in my fileserver, they still going without any issues, and they get hammered hard for a home file server.

Again, just ensure, they byte size is equal or bigger than the current Seagate 2TB you have.

 

[Pada]

Again, just ensure, they byte size is equal or bigger than the current Seagate 2TB you have.

Thanks. That isn't such a big issue for me, because I haven't spanned my data RAID partition over the whole drive due since I needed a SWAP and OS partition too. So I may just resize the SWAP partition if the new HDD is smaller.

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

Replaced my drive today. Glad I did it before failure, the drive has a distinct sound of something loose inside

 

[Pada]

Great stuff.

I've replaced that drive with one with fewer bad sectors and my RAID 5 array rebuild finished too - after just less than 2 days
I think forcing my HP Microserver CPU cores to 1.3GHz, instead of letting it go down to 800Mhz made a difference in the rebuild time...

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

Great stuff.

I've replaced that drive with one with fewer bad sectors and my RAID 5 array rebuild finished too - after just less than 2 days
I think forcing my HP Microserver CPU cores to 1.3GHz, instead of letting it go down to 800Mhz made a difference in the rebuild time...

Arg, turns out it's not the drive giving me my errors, replaced the drive, the cable, checked power. Still getting errors on the channel, must be the controller channel. I'll just have to wait for the rebuild to finish too

md127 : active raid5 sdc1[6] sde1[4] sdd1[2] sdb1[5]
      5860535808 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [4/3] [U_UU]
      [====>................]  recovery = 21.9% (427990916/1953511936) finish=884.2min speed=28752K/sec

 

[Pada]

Eish - so now my HDD that had some bad sectors failed completely, because it doesn't want to detect durion BIOS POST even.

What RAID / software configuration is the easiest to manage/swap out a broken hard drive?

I'm now considering replacing my 4x 2TB in software RAID 5 with like 2x 2TB + 2x 4TB in RAID 10 (not sure if N36L supports this in hardware either) + 16GB flashdrive for OS.

Also, would you guys recommend having different hard drive brands to limit simultaneous failures?

 

[ponder]

Have you explored zfs yet?

 

[DrJohnZoidberg]

Have you explored zfs yet?

I'm using FreeNAS at our office. No need to replace any drives yet though so don't know how streamlined it is. I guess I'm going to find out one day though

 

[The_Unbeliever]

Also, would you guys recommend having different hard drive brands to limit simultaneous failures?

Nothing you can do to limit simultaneous failures, because Mr Murphy. You know that guy.

All you can do is to backup your data to a different media (preferably both tape and HDD if possible).

 

[Pada]

Thanks again for the feedback.

I'm now just going with a single 3TB WD Red, just so that I don't run into the issue where my logical volume is too big for the 2TB drive. I guess I'll redo the whole thing in a couple of years from now when I actually start to use more than 70% of 6TB.