On 28/05/13 12:16, Chris Walker wrote:
Having seen that others are suffering RAID problems, perhaps now is an opportune time to ask about mine.
I have an Edimax enclosure with 2 x 1TB discs in it. I got a notification from it yesterday to say that sdb had either failed or would fail within the next 24 hours.
The drives were bought at the same time as the enclosure so given that one is failing or has failed, is it wise for me to replace both?
You could replace just one if necessary. If you are able to, and can afford to, I would replace both. Why? If you just replace 1, the eldest will be the most likely to fail. Newer drives will likely be faster, higher capacity and/or use less power. IMO, it's easier if you have two of the same drives - less chance of hardware incompatibilities, and more likely to work well together.
On the flip side though, it'll take longer and be harder to change 2 drives, and, you may run into problems if the partitions are not the same size on the new disks as on the old ones - depending on how your RAID works and the capabilities of the EDIMAX enclosure. You might find that you buy a 2TB disk but can only use 1TB because you can't expand the partitions on the RAID.
The discs in there at the moment are Seagate drives and I don't think I specified anything special for them i.e. I just bought 2 discs. This time I'm going to go for something like a WD Red drive which are specified for NAS use.
So 2 questions. Does anybody have any recommendations for discs or are the Western Digital discs ok? And second, should I replace both or is one ok for the time being?
I seem to remember reading that WD didn't have a good reputation, but I may be wrong about that. I've favoured Seagate and Maxstore in the past, though I think they're the same company now.
HTH Steve