Zyxel NSA-221 RAID1 Degraded

[dotdavid]

I have had a NSA-221 for a while now running 2x 250GB drives in a RAID1 array with no problems on firmware 4.40. I recently upgraded to a pair of 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 drives and for a few days after installation things were fine. However after those few days the NAS became unresponsive (couldn't log into web UI or access SMB shares) so I rebooted it. After the reboot the RAID array was reported as being degraded. Both disks are reported as "healthy" in the SMART software add-on however.

I attempted to repair the RAID array but it gave me an error saying something along the lines of the second hard drive must be equal or greater in size to the first hard drive. I tried the "failed" drive in a Ubuntu VM and the data appeared to be there, so I wiped all the partitions, rebuilt the RAID volume and restored from a backup.

However three or four days after doing this the RAID array failed again, with the same symptoms.

My question is; is this symptomatic of a hard drive failure (considering the healthy SMART status and fact I can read the drive's data in Ubuntu) or is it just buggy RAID software in the NAS? I would ordinarily blame the drive, but the NAS *is* extraordinarily buggy so I don't really trust it not to waste my time.

Are there any good tools that would diagnose a drive failure - I was thinking of using Seagate's SeaTools with the drive in a USB disk caddy but wonder if it would get confused with the filesystem on the drive considering it's for Windows/DOS only.

Any advice gratefully received...

[tipstir]

Originally Posted by dotdavid

I have had a NSA-221 for a while now running 2x 250GB drives in a RAID1 array with no problems on firmware 4.40. I recently upgraded to a pair of 3TB Seagate ST3000DM001 drives and for a few days after installation things were fine. However after those few days the NAS became unresponsive (couldn't log into web UI or access SMB shares) so I rebooted it. After the reboot the RAID array was reported as being degraded. Both disks are reported as "healthy" in the SMART software add-on however.

I attempted to repair the RAID array but it gave me an error saying something along the lines of the second hard drive must be equal or greater in size to the first hard drive. I tried the "failed" drive in a Ubuntu VM and the data appeared to be there, so I wiped all the partitions, rebuilt the RAID volume and restored from a backup.

However three or four days after doing this the RAID array failed again, with the same symptoms.

My question is; is this symptomatic of a hard drive failure (considering the healthy SMART status and fact I can read the drive's data in Ubuntu) or is it just buggy RAID software in the NAS? I would ordinarily blame the drive, but the NAS *is* extraordinarily buggy so I don't really trust it not to waste my time.

Are there any good tools that would diagnose a drive failure - I was thinking of using Seagate's SeaTools with the drive in a USB disk caddy but wonder if it would get confused with the filesystem on the drive considering it's for Windows/DOS only.

Any advice gratefully received...

How do you know it's the NSA which you did say was working fine. Are you use the firmware update supports 3Tb..

[dotdavid]

Originally Posted by tipstir

How do you know it's the NSA which you did say was working fine. Are you use the firmware update supports 3Tb..

Hi, I'm definitely on the 3TB-supporting firmware, but some people I've been speaking to say it might be something to do with the RAID implementation and/or XFS file system. I'm going to try it with a JBOD configuration using one drive as master and backing up regularly to the other drive, to see if that is any more stable.