In 2009 I bought an Edimax NAS from Scan.co.uk and it's worked fine since, albeit with a change of hard drives.
However over the weekend it wouldn't power up cleanly. Neither of the hard drive lights would come on and it wouldn't come ready. I also couldn't communicate with it in any way.
I got in touch with Edimax and they suggested doing a reset on it. That at least allowed me to communicate with it and it came ready, but it said that the discs weren't installed correctly although it did show the partitions.
I removed both drives (WD 1TB Red drives in RAID1) and using mdadm, I can see the contents of disc 1 and it all looks ok.
If I buy another NAS box, is there any way I can simply put these drives in it and expect it to work, or should I expect the new box to have a different arrangement somehow of formatting?
What I'm seeking to avoid is loads of copying and moving of files.
Are there any recommendations from people here as to a small (I don't want huge amounts of storage and I power off the box when not used) NAS?
On Tue, 27 Sep 2016 10:10:09 +0100 Chris Walker alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk allegedly wrote:
In 2009 I bought an Edimax NAS from Scan.co.uk and it's worked fine since, albeit with a change of hard drives.
However over the weekend it wouldn't power up cleanly. Neither of the hard drive lights would come on and it wouldn't come ready. I also couldn't communicate with it in any way.
I got in touch with Edimax and they suggested doing a reset on it. That at least allowed me to communicate with it and it came ready, but it said that the discs weren't installed correctly although it did show the partitions.
I removed both drives (WD 1TB Red drives in RAID1) and using mdadm, I can see the contents of disc 1 and it all looks ok.
If I buy another NAS box, is there any way I can simply put these drives in it and expect it to work, or should I expect the new box to have a different arrangement somehow of formatting?
What I'm seeking to avoid is loads of copying and moving of files.
Are there any recommendations from people here as to a small (I don't want huge amounts of storage and I power off the box when not used) NAS?
2009 is a long time ago. Time to upgrade. :-)
If you are sure that the array was built using mdadm (and it sounds like it was) then you should have no problem just installing the array in another box (assuming that new box doesn't do hardware raid). After all, that is part of the point of using software raid - a hardware failure doesn't leave you stranded.
But if you only need 1 TB of store and the array is usually turned off, why do you need NAS? Do you share the store between various other boxes? If not, and the NAS is simply used as backup, why not just use USB external drives(s)? They are cheap, pretty reliable and you could use two separate units for redundancy. If you need to share the storage I'd still personally consider buying external USB drives and simply hooking them to your router (assuming that your router supports external USB drives, and most do these days). Just be careful that you don't end up sharing your filestore with the great unwashed on the internet.
Mick
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Mick Morgan gpg fingerprint: FC23 3338 F664 5E66 876B 72C0 0A1F E60B 5BAD D312 http://baldric.net
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On 27/09/16 13:44, mick wrote:
On Tue, 27 Sep 2016 10:10:09 +0100 Chris Walker alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk allegedly wrote:
In 2009 I bought an Edimax NAS from Scan.co.uk and it's worked fine since, albeit with a change of hard drives.
<SNIP> Sorry, I don't know where to get a NAS. If you an find one that does, raid using MDADM, then perhaps all will be well, but TBH I don't know if you'll find one. Perhaps you can find another one like the one you had originally, in that case, you might be able to just shove the disks in - BUT if the NAS has failed somehow, then perhaps it's also time to change disks too? Perhaps just get a smallish PC, install linux on it with mdadm and get that to be a RAID disk server rather than a NAS unit. I would get new disks though use MDADM swap from the old ones to the new ones. Two ways of going about it, either increase the number of disks in the array, then add the new ones. MDADM will then copy the data to the new disks. Once that's finished, tell mdadm to "fail" the original two disks, remove them, then reduce the size of the array back down to two disks. Alternatively, "fail" one of the disks, replace it with a new one. Once the data has synced, then "fail" the other original disk, then replace it with the other new one. Then you're using the new disks entirely.
Whatever you do, good luck!
Steve
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Chris Walker -
mick -
steve-ALUG＠hst.me.uk