N8800 lost RAID

[Splash]

Howdy

We have an N8800 at work which has recently lost it's RAID. The disks are all visible, though the hot spare is reporting a warning for 36 reallocated sectors. I've logged a ticket with Thecus yesterday however their support staff seem to be at a Happy Dragon Boat Festival (whatever that may be) and we're struggling along without it.

Anyone here got any ideas what might cause this? Again, the RAID isn't degraded, rather the unit is showing no array to be present.

[lexos]

Hi,

warning for 36 reallocated sectors - are they pending?...I had some issues as well on one disk with "pending sectors" in -> disk -> n/A..... Solution was to change the drive.

What are the disk types? what kind of status they've got? that was a spare as well but sometimes coming up with N/A or ok...but I never lost the raid info

[Splash]

All the disks are ST31500341AS, but the supported firmare revisions (SD1B and CC1H).

SMART INFO
Tray Number 8
Model ST31500341AS
Power On Hours 1511 Hours
Temperature Celsius 28
Reallocated Sector Count 36
Current Pending Sector 0

But that disk is the hotspare in a RAID5 array, even if it was failed rather than simply issuing a warning the RAID should still be there. And even if it failed and was a part of the main array I should see a RAID degraded warning, rather than just the disappearance of the array.

[lexos]

yes you are right...

for me was: Current Pending Sector 58.....so the disk was blocked by the Thecus (N/A).

Anyway....as it was a spare it's not normal...but seems that the N8800 and N7700 are still abit buggy...I hope that a new firmware will come soon.

This spare disk on my side was really blocking the raid....impossible to start a new raid config (well was started but hanging....) sometimes weird.

[Splash]

Hmm... it's looking like a warranty return as things stand, all 4 rear fans plus one of the internals has stopped working (yet nothing reported in the logs.)

[philhu]

Sounds like a plug pull and hope for the best.

[Splash]

Ok, new unit has arrived and the array isn't showing there either - we'd like to attempt to recover data before scrubbing the array however the array takes up all 8 disks. I'm hoping we can connect up an eSATA disk, create a seperate array on that and install the SSHD and SYSUSER modules to see if we can then recover the array and I was wondering if anyone has any experience of doing this on the N8800? Is this even possible? Obviously we're not planning to run with the eSATA disk connected permanently, so I'm hoping we can remove it (and the master RAID with it, effectively) without losing access to the data.

[Splash]

Gah, you can't install the modules to an eSATA disk.

[Splash]

Whoah, we have liftoff.


Pulled the drive that was in "warning" state (the array hotspare) and bounced the box. All works fine now. That's some screwed up version of RAID5+hotspare in my eyes...