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Sometimes, things work as intended

A small computer success story:

I have a Synology NAS at home. For those who aren't familiar with them, they're small computers that are set up to make storing and sharing files easy. They keep your data across multiple hard drives so that if a hard drive fails, no data is lost. Or, at least, that's the theory.

After we moved last year, I set up the NAS and ran all of the status checks. It reported that one drive was still working but starting to have problems. I bought another drive, plugged it in, and set it as a "hot spare" (basically, the system knew about it, but it wasn't being used). I also turned on monthly disk checks. Months passed with no more problems.

...until last Tuesday. On Tuesday night, the system automatically sent us mail to tell us that

  1. The troubled disk had finally failed.
  2. Since we had a hot spare, it would be used as a replacement disk and our data would be copied to it.
  3. When everything was finished, the system would let us know.
I ordered a replacement drive (Western Digital Red, in case you care) from Digitec, and said that I'd pick it up at their depot on the other side of town.

On Wednesday afternoon, the system sent a follow-up "everything's good now" message. By that time, I'd picked up the replacement drive. After removing the bad drive, installing the new drive and logging in, the system gave me a vague "You need to follow our advice and finish doing something" warning. I wish I'd grabbed a screenshot. It was almost hilariously vague.

Fortunately, I knew what had to be done. I told the system to configure the new drive as a hot spare for the other drives. It immediately kicked off a full check of the new drive. On Thursday, the spare was checked and ready to go.

Overall, aside from one confusing error message, everything worked well and exactly as designed. I've worked with storage in previous jobs. It's never that easy. Status checks fail. Notifications fail. Rebuilds fail. Replacement drives don't arrive in time or, when they do arrive, the new drives won't play nicely with the existing drives. Even though this was a small home problem, it just worked. It's so nice when that happens.

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Comments

  1. Maralyn GableFriday, June 9, 2017 at 1:47:00 PM GMT+2

    Sounds like it worked well, which is neat because it seems computers seldom do.
    How do you know a hard drive is ready to fail if it doesn't send you a note?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. MeFriday, June 9, 2017 at 4:28:00 PM GMT+2

      Hard drives include something called SMART https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. that lets your computer ask the hard drive whether everything's okay. In theory, your computer should check your hard drive's SMART status occasionally and alert you if anything's amiss.

      The unfortunate reality is that computers do a bad job of passing along those messages (or, when they do, of making it clear that "SMART error" means "You need to buy a new hard drive right away"), so you usually know that a hard drive is bad when it starts to make terrible noises and stops worksing.

      Delete

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