NAS-less in the North

Over the Easter long weekend, I experience my own resurrection of sorts.  On Thursday just before Easter I noticed that my NAS, a Thecus N3200 Pro with three Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives in a RAID5 array, was beeping and displaying a “RAID degraded” message.  I didn’t worry about it to much, as it was late on Thursday, and I figured I was safe/okay with three drives in a RAID5 array.

So, the next morning I check things out.  Turns out all was not well in Whoville.  While check the RAID config, I saw that two of the three drives had “warnings” associated with them.  This was Not Good.  Two out of three failing HDD in a RAID5 array is A Bad Thing.  A bit of Googling and conversing with the vendor who sold me the NAS (note- I’ve got no problems with them, Hard Data has always been great for me for the past six or seven years) and it seems that there is a firmware upgrade for my particular trio of NAS drives.  Luckily, I managed to get all my critical stuff off the NAS, so I’m not to worried about data loss. 

So, I pull the drives, apply the firmware update, and try to rebuild. The NAS will not let me create a RAID5 array.  So, I pull the drives one by one, and then proceed to check them out in a computer.  Turns out that the two drives that had the warnings were okay, but the third drive, that was “warning-less” is toast.  What is wrong with it I’m not sure, but the BIOS on the computer won’t recognize the drive after boot up.  Had to RMA the drive back to Seagate. 

So, now I sit, alone in my room, without my NAS.