I have a TS-XE4.0TL/R5 with four 1TB hard drives running in a RAID 10 array. The firmware is current (v 1.72) and the unit is out of warranty. The usable disk space is about 1800 GB and it is about 76.6% full. The unit has been having problems for the last couple of weeks. Boot-up can take over an hour until the green ring light around the power button stops flashing. (Boot-up used to take only a couple of minutes). Moreover, the unit appears to have been doing a RAID scan for the past week or so. The specific message shown is "RAID I15 ARRAY1 Scanning". The LCD Message List published by BuffaloTech indicates that this means that the unit is examining the error status of RAID array 1 and that "transfer speeds are slower during the examination process."
While this has been going on, navigating the share drives is an extremely slow process, and accessing files is near-impossible. Every command I give seems to time out. Hence I can't save or retrieve information from my shares, nor can I empty the trashbox. The unit has effectively been unusable for a couple of weeks now. I connected the LAN2 cable to see whether that might help, and it didn't. The bottleneck is clearly inside the unit.
At this point I don't really know what to do. I would appreciate hearing suggestions.
One thought would be to turn off the RAID functionality and have the four drives function separately. Could I do that and not affect the contents of the hard drives? If that is the case, then maybe I could copy my files from drives 1 and 2 and resort to drives 3 and 4 as a back-up.
A variant of this would be to pull hard drives 3 and 4 in order to stop the RAID scan and copy my files to a new drive.
I have also considered buying either a new 4-disk enclosure or a used & empty TS-XE4.0CL/R5 from eBay, setting it for RAID 10, and popping my 4 drives into the unit.
However, I think the issue is with the drives, so I doubt that the last option would work.
Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks so much!