Great, today my RAID1 has degraded. Earlier I noticed that disk 2 has failed, really really failed. It's now inaccessible, while before when looking at the SMART info, it stated its Health was BAD!, with a read_error_state of Failed.

Just updated my NAS' firmware and on the reboot it now only finds one HDD. Now quickly looking for a replacement HDD, while this drive goes to Shuttle for them to replace. Of course this doesn't bode well for the other hard drive, as that's been subjected to similarly high temperatures. We hope we can get both of them replaced by Shuttle, despite one of the HDDs being out of warranty (but that's hardly our fault, we bought it at the same time as the NAS).

The other HDD is Out of Region, making things not easier either.

First running an backup of everything on the NAS to the 3TB USB drive on the TV server. And although it's an incremental backup, it's still going to take 4+ hours. We'll see.

I am very happy with the Zyxel NAS though. It's warned me immediately of logging into it that the RAID is degarded and that I should rebuild the array. Which is difficult when only one drive is found. ;)

Edit: just bought Seagate NAS HDD, 8 TB (2x 4 TB) for €300.-
Edit2: And a couple of hours later I canceled them again, as I found out there's an 8 workday wait for these. I need them earlier. NAS is backed up now, but I can't write to it with just one drive in there.

---

Don't use Seagate, Jord... EVERY Seagate drive I've ever had, (going back to when they bought Connor - YEAH that long ago), has been defective for me. When I bought my first MAC; a sales guy talked me into getting a Seagate F&W SCSI drive... That too, was dead in box when it got to me...

I swear by Western Digital drives. NEVER has a WD drive failed me. :-)

Oh, and for that MAC, I went to Quantum Atlas F&W SCSI. (4.3 GB, back in 1996.) Quantum was as good as WD; but, THEN Seagate bought them... NEVER again will I buy Quantum. The first thing Seagate did when the bought Quantum was get rid of the R&D department, and Quality Control... So, NEVER again will I trust Quantum... If that name is even still around... Seagate could have killed it, I don't know for sure, though...


TL

---

Have TARDIS, will travel...
Come along K-9!
Join Calm Chaos
Pluto is still a planet

Don't use Seagate, Jord... EVERY Seagate drive I've ever had, (going back to when they bought Connor - YEAH that long ago), has been defective for me.
I swear by Western Digital drives. NEVER has a WD drive failed me. :-)

Always interesting to see. My experience has been the opposite, in that I have a good stack of dead WDs here, but the Seagates keep on chugging. If at all possible, I avoid WDs.
Now, if you want to talk Miniscribe ... :) That was an interesting bunch ...

---

I've got all Seagate drives in my personal computer, the 250GB small Barracuda drive in there is going to come up on 8 years of age and still going good.

The two drives that were in the NAS were Western Digital, model WDC WD40EZRX. Now, I know no drive really survives 90 degrees centigrade, but this was the first drive to completely die on me in all of my years with computers. The other problem with them was that one was already out of warranty, and the other sold out of region. So I may never get replacements for them, at least not from WD. We bought both the NAS and the drives just 2 years ago.

But then it's the Shuttle NAS that caused this, so Shuttle just has to fork out.

In the mean time, I went and bought 2 of the same Seagate NAS ST4000VN000 from another company. Of course here they had only one drive in store as well and had to order the other one, but that's going to take less than 8 work days. Price was the same, around 300 euros. And this time I got them as a present from my mom, for all the care I give to her. Bless her.

And yeah, maybe not a good idea to put WD Green drives into a NAS, but then when the thing is cooled enough that shouldn't matter much. On WD colors, anyone know what the WD Purple color is for?

---

And yeah, maybe not a good idea to put WD Green drives into a NAS, but then when the thing is cooled enough that shouldn't matter much. On WD colors, anyone know what the WD Purple color is for?

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2166180/difference-western-digital-colors.html

---

I'd seen that one already Gary, it doesn't explain Purple.

---

I have always sworn by Seagate, from the first computer I ever built and since then. I have had a couple crash over the years, but very minimal. Usually bought the 'server class' variants.
I've got one in one of my older crunchers still running on an Adaptec SCSI interface card.

My daily driver has since been upgraded to a Samsung 850 Pro 256GB SSD.

I'd seen that one already Gary, it doesn't explain Purple.

is says "purple is for surveillance recording" That would be for a DVR recording say 32 video streams at once 24/7. If you were looking for a drive for a video editing computer it might be your choice.

---

WD Purple Surveillance Storage is built for 24/7, always-on, high-definition surveillance security systems that use up to eight hard drives and up to 32 cameras.

Which would also apply to any heavily loaded 24/7 RAID server for any use, where a high MTBF is a requirement. Surveillance use is just one suggestion.

OR Seti crunchers doing it 24/7 for years on ends, I might add.
Meow.

Well exactly Mark. Crunchers working 24/7 with the input/output they have are simply acting as servers in terms of data loading. Ordinary desktop drives are not designed for that type of work, they are meant to cope with standard office 9-5 hours with an accordant MTBF. If you want to run desktops like servers then you either equip them with server quality bits, or you accept the shortened life and regular replacements.

I have been very lucky and only lost 1 drive and 2 GPU cards in 7 years of crunching 24/7 with 6-14 desktop machines. But they were/are all Dell/HP/Compaq stuff which is fairly mid-market anyway. Mainly WD drives from what I can recall. I never buy s/h drives or cards, only new.
-
As always YMMV.

I run 24/7 with plenty of I/O, kiddo.
Not as much as the servers at some certain reference sites, to be sure, but they grind away all the time.

WD Purple Surveillance Storage is built for 24/7, always-on, high-definition surveillance security systems that use up to eight hard drives and up to 32 cameras.

Which would also apply to any heavily loaded 24/7 RAID server for any use, where a high MTBF is a requirement. Surveillance use is just one suggestion.

Uh, no. Surveillance is continuous sequential writes of large files with almost zero read activity. That isn't the pattern of "any heavily loaded 24/7 RAID server" which would be random read/write of small files. That is why they have server class drives.

---

Okay, so last night while playing Fallout 4 all of a sudden I had all kinds of artifacts on screen. Immediately checked the GPU temperature, but that was kind of normal for the game, not even 65C. Exited the game, tried another game (Far Cry 3) and it had the same artifacts.

Ow-kay.
Did a reboot of my system and upon starting Windows it needed to do consistency checking of the hard drive. It immediately threw away two broken file segments and then proceeded to remove some 57 file indexes. Great!

Back in Windows I started an elevated sfc /SCANNOW, which ran to 60% and then exited with the all favorite Windows Resource Protection found corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them message. I tried a couple of the solutions here but shy of repair installing Windows, none worked.

So... repair install Windows then, ey?
But if there is a problem on my hard drive, won't that just move forwards with the new Windows installation? I suspect it will.

Tested something else, I checked for some other games I have installed that are running from a different drive and have their save games on a different drive. These worked flawlessly, no artifacts, even while they put more of a load on my system than Fallout 4 or Far Cry 3. I ran some of the OpenCL and OpenGL tests in GPU CAPS Viewer as well, they also ran without trouble.

Aha... more and more pointing to a problem with the drive these games saved the save games to and that Windows resides on.
Next I moved the My Documents directory to another drive, started Fallout 4 and went to Load Game (instead of continue). It shows small images of the save games and the last two save game images showed the artifacts. I loaded a save game from before that and the game started without problems. Yay! (Not yay for Far Cry 3 which works with one save game only, but too bad).

Now I'm here at this point in time where I think... it's not a good idea to repair install Windows on the drive that seemingly has problems. It's a better idea to buy a new HDD, use one of the imaging programs to move all the data/partitions of this drive over to the new HDD (yay for having a USB 3.0 docking station!). And then remove the 'broken' Windows drive, put the new drive in its place..., and repair install Windows on that.

I still have AOMEI Partition Assistant Home Editor installed that can make an image of any drive to another drive.

So, long story ends, I just ordered another Seagate, this time a Desktop SSHD 2TB Hybrid. It's replacing a 1TB drive, and with the NAS going to exist of eventually 16TB of RAID5, I don't really see the need for me to add a bigger drive in my system. Besides, it appears all drives after this are 5,400/5,900 rpm, while this drive is 7,200 rpm, the same speed all my drives in this system are.

I like the techno blurb on it: Boots Windows® 8 in less than 10 seconds
Ah, but Windows 7 takes several minutes, still? ;-)

Here's the advert on why SSHDs are better than sliced cheese! :)
Can't wait.

Also can't wait to fix the Network is not connected icon I have on this system. I am posting this, aren't I? So you're dead wrong, icon.

---

Probably worth checking with seatools to confirm drive is failing, some documentation here Seatools-for-windows.pdf

Also can't wait to fix the Network is not connected icon I have on this system. I am posting this, aren't I? So you're dead wrong, icon.

http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/forum_thread.php?id=10752

---

Probably worth checking with seatools to confirm drive is failing

Thanks, had those already installed and ran them on the drive, there are no problems found. I already knew the drive wasn't failing as its SMART isn't telling me there are problems.

I do know that the most probably cause is Windows going corrupt, or a problem with the file system being corrupt. What I plan to do when all has been moved over and Windows installed on the other drive, is to reformat this drive a couple of times and check it rigorously with Seatools. It's a Samsung, which in reality means it's a Seagate these days as well. ;-)

By just repair installing Windows on this same drive, any trouble there is with the file system will probably continue. So I thought it better to move to a new hard drive.

By the by, what's with the Windows 7 Backup option? I looked at it earlier, thought I'd make a backup of my present settings and such, but no... this backup option wants to have 1.08TB of free space to make 'an image of my present Windows'. Now, I don't mind that, but my present Windows is only taking up 1.77GB, so why does it need a terabyte for the image? Preposterous!

---

Probably worth checking with seatools to confirm drive is failing

Thanks, had those already installed and ran them on the drive, there are no problems found. I already knew the drive wasn't failing as its SMART isn't telling me there are problems.

<snip windows problems>

Preposterous!

Use the Force Jord, use the Force...

edit: there is always the Dark Side.

Just got rid of both of them from my Gmail, so am not planning on getting either back. :)

---

Windows is not happy, looking in Event Viewer I see a lot of warnings and informational messages telling me that things are broken. But it is still running. I don't think I will want to reboot at this time, but on the other hand, had this been Windows XP or 2000, they'd have died already.

A lot of services cannot run, Windows Update died, the time server cannot be reached. Yep, it's on its last legs, but has to continue for now until the new drive is here. No other choice.

---

Monologue continues:
I seem to have gotten a bad spill. Woke up this morning without my voice and only a deep and painful cough. That wasn't the bad thing even, no, that was when I picked up my phone. It had crashed, so I rebooted it. Upon the restart I got the message that the SD card was damaged and that I should reformat it.

Took it out, put it in a card reader sleeve, put it in the laptop's card reader... it finds it and can read the contents. OK. Copied everything off it to the laptop's HDD.

Ran a virus scan on the SD card. Found nothing.
Am now running Malwarebytes anti-malware on it. So far nothing.

I have a spare 32GB SD card lying here, so I can move everything from the HDD onto that one and use that. Or so I hope.

Shrug.
At least the good news is that both my SSHD and my two NAS HDDs are now in the mail winging their way to me and are supposed to arrive tomorrow. In separate boxes, apparently.

Can't wait. :)

---

Wow, I could've used this two weeks ago when the first NAS crashed. https://www.cgsecurity.org/ has two very powerful and free programs with which you can recover data from crashed drives. I am now using PhotoRec to recover data from my wife's SD card that isn't being recognized in anything.

The other program is called TestDisk and can recover data from any drive, as long as it's still being recognized by a computer/docking station. Seeing the long list of file systems it can recover, I'm sure it would've been able to find data on the crashed RAID. And otherwise PhotoRec would've been able to do so.

---