Having NAS Problems

My 3TB Western Digital ext hd broke and some of my backup data was in my QNAP TS-509 Pro populated with 5 1tb Samsung SATA 3 gb/s hds. So I was transferring data from my NAS to my new Western Digital My Passport 2 TB portable drive when hd #1 was ejected [went bad]. Stupid me I didn’t power down and reboot the NAS to see if hd #1 would read good again. I instead went to MicroCenter and bought a Western Digital 1TB SATA 6gb/s hd – they said it would work with Sata 3gb/s interfaces [they didn’t have any 1tb Sata 3gb/s hds there]. Well, I plug in the new hd to slot #1 and the NAS rebuilds the RAID 5, took all afternoon and all night, then it crashed on hd # 4 being ejected. At the same time while the NAS rebuilds I pull data off of it because the NAS is my last source of it, - like critical home remodeling pics that weren’t backed up anywhere else. If I lost this data I would be toast trying to recover the data from a data recovery center which might charge me $5000 to do an NAS data recovery.

Anyway I stick the new Sata 6gb/s hd in the NAS and the NAS rebuilds. Messes up any chance of no rebuilding had I kept my original Samsung #1 hd inside. Messes up the rebuild twice on hd #4 being ejected. 3rd time I stick in the original Samsung 1 tb hd in slot #1 and it works and rebuilds. After rebuilding up to 40% both the hd #1 runs into an error and hd #4 gets ejected.

So after 3 attempts of failed rebuilds, each caused by hd #4, I guess my hd#4 is 98% reliable and will crash every time on a rebuild. And I guess the #1 Samsung drive is only 98% reliable too – after putting it back it seemed good in the NAS, but I guess it would fail in another rebuild. So I guess my only choice to double backup my copied data from my 2tb Passport to another spare 3TB drive, making sure I copied ALL the data off the NAS, then buy another new Western Digital 1TB hd Sata 6gb/s for hd slot #4 and replace that in the NAS. I will blow apart the NAS by erasing all data with 2 new hds installed, cause a new reformat and I have to copy back all of my data?

Any thoughts on this? It seems nowadays you have to have not double backup of your data but TRIPLE backup, because if your NAS goes out while rebuilding then all of your data is toast! Anyone think or have experience using SATA 6gb/s hds on an SATA 3gb/s channel? - Seems to work with no problems though. It seems like they are going to stop selling Sata 3 gb/s hds soon.

I can use the 98% reliable Samsung hds #1 & #4 as spare "torrent test" OS hard drives.

 

No such thing as a 98% reliable drive - when it fails - it will be corrupting data you won't know about and make other drives seem like they're failing too (assuming you're copying files back and forth to them).

A basic backup solution is two backups backing up a backup - along with the original data living on your day to day system drive.

Yeah - four copies of your data, but that is not enough by itself. You need offsite backup, rotating backup and a backup of the system/OS/programs that can read your data (and then a backup of that too). All close, but not in the same physical location (for protection from theft/fire/water) and certainly not linked to each other either.


Is this taking backup too far? I don't know, why don't you tell me? If your system did self-destruct and you had nothing... would you have spent the $10-20K to recover it?

If the answer is 'yes' - then you have your answer: (you need more backups).