Network Attached Storage 3

Last Saturday, I was backing up my files onto my NAS to allow me to access a spreadsheet I had made from my best friend's house, and I had stepped into the restroom to relieve myself. A couple minutes later I heard beeping and I ran though what it could be from, and after about half a minute, I figured out it was the NAS.

I checked the fans to make sure they were still spinning, and they were. Once I was back in the chair, I saw that the backup had stalled, and I tried to access the NAS via Firefox to no avail (I might have not waited long enough). I then grab my phone and use the DS Finder application to see what was going on, and it told me that volume 1 has crashed.

I tried restarting the NAS and it didn't work very smoothly, but it didn't help, so I decided to shut it down and pull the disk out. Since I had a bit of trouble pulling the disk out, I moved the NAS itself, removing the cables attached to it, and realized I was pushing on the lock tab down instead of up. I decided to clean the dust out and then connected disk 1 to the Dell to look at the SMART info with Parted Magic.

I found that the "Current pending sector count" had a value of 4, and it was considered a "pre-failure" value. I tried to run the short SMART test, but it hung on 90%. I tried to use MultiSystem to run the SMART test, but the disk utility in it was weird and didn't seem to properly start the test.

I found that there was some sort of systemctl bug that made the SMART test hang at 90% and that it was fixed in December 2013. Unfortunately for me, Parted Magic is dated for August 2013 and MultiSystem for September. I'll eventually download Gparted Live, since I'll need something a bit more updated.

The good news is that I can still use the NAS with a drive missing, though the power button flashes orange when the NAS is awake. I'm grateful for using RAID 1, since it allows for the array to continue to be used until the drive is replaced; I'm sure that if I was using any parity-based RAID array, the array would be unusable until I replaced the drive.

Once I get the newer ISO of Gparted Live, I'll try running the short SMART test again and see what it comes up with. I'll probably format it and try to use it for something else - the hard drive doesn't sound right when reading, so I'd rather not format it and stick it back into the NAS just to have it fail again.

I'll update once I get it tested.