Storage

[krisludington]

This is a three parter:

How can we tell (remotely) when one of the drives in a LinkStation Pro Duo fails when operating it in RAID 1 mode?  Email notification is useless since there is no such thing as an SMTP server without authentication.  Also, the user manual is so incomplete that I can't really tell from it the best way with the HTTP GUI, although I can make some guesses based on the spotty information. There is a Knowledge base article on how tell from the lights and beeps (KB#000069), but that doesn't do any good for a remote administrator.

Can the failed drive be replaced with any SATA drive which is the same size or larger?

What is the procedure for replacing the drive and recovering the mirror again? (This is asked in another thread, but there was no answer at the time of this post.)

Kris Ludington

Message Edited by krisludington on 03-01-2009 02:14 PM

Message Edited by krisludington on 03-01-2009 02:14 PM

[krisludington]

Oddly, there is no information in the manual for the LinkStation Pro Duo on how to actually restore files made from a backup configured with the unit's Disk Backup features in the HTTP GUI.  What am I missing?

[klaborde]

Hello,

I am a new owner of th Linkstation Pro Duo 2TB.

I hope someone answers your questions, because I would like to know these answers as well.

I purchased this unit, and configured it for Raid-1 (Mirroring)

I want to know how to replace a drive when one fails.

The documentation has no chapters on replacing disk drives.

If I read one more time, that the unit has to be returned for repair,

I am going to dump it on ebay...

It's a dam shame to spend money on such a device, and you have no

instructions on how to swap a drive.

Thanks,

Keith

[esatori]

I have a 20 Pro Duo 1tbs and will answer your questions base on my experience with them.

I adjusted my SMTP server to allow the ip address range  the drives are on send without authentication.  That solved the email problem.  (I use Mdaemon for email server)

Yes, I have replaced a failed drive with a larger 1tb drive.  The unit was configured as raid0 and after replacing the drive, the unit automatically started rebuilding the raid on the new disk.

The drive itself was very easy to replace.  After replacement, everything was automatic for me.

I had the data backed up to another unit so was not concerned with losing data and wanted to replace both drives with the larger 1tb drives but the drives had to be replaced one at a time after the rebuild of the array was complete.

This was only my experience, YMMV :)

Message Edited by esatori on 03-28-2009 10:30 AM

Message Edited by esatori on 03-28-2009 10:30 AM

[dbjock]

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krisludington wrote:

This is a three parter:

How can we tell (remotely) when one of the drives in a LinkStation Pro Duo fails when operating it in RAID 1 mode?  Email notification is useless since there is no such thing as an SMTP server without authentication.  Also, the user manual is so incomplete that I can't really tell from it the best way with the HTTP GUI, although I can make some guesses based on the spotty information. There is a Knowledge base article on how tell from the lights and beeps (KB#000069), but that doesn't do any good for a remote administrator.

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I did some digging on this one and came across Smallnetbuilder.com's review on the Buffalo LinkStation Pro. The review is here http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30295/75/

In the review the did a RAID Fail test, http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/30295/75/1/5/

and there they provide a screen shot whcih can be seen here:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/myincludes/image_page.php?/images/stories/nas/buffalo_linkstation_pro_duo/linkstation_pro_duo_raid_error.jpg

Apparently from reading the review the emails were not always true either. Though this may have already been addressed by Buffalo my firmware updates.

Hope this helps.

[tanjl]

This is based on what I've done so probably you can pickup some pointers. 

My company is using a LS Pro Duo.

We had one of the drive failed.

The only way to know is that if the users cannot connect to the LS Pro Duo.

However, based on the user's problem description, the IP of the LS Pro Duo was valid. 

So we access into the LS Pro Duo's IP address and it was able to accessed to the LS Pro Dup console's page.

On the header of the first page that we logged on, we are able to see that there is a RAID Error.

Then we clicked on Disk Management to see that Disk X was not ticked.

We advised one of the user to remove Disk X and replaced it with another model if similar size.

Once he've done that, we again access the console page of the LS Pro Duo, click on Disk X and then proceed to Restructure Disk Array.

After couple of hourse, we re-logged in to see that the error mesaage was no longer there and checking on Status, it was unning in RAID 1.

Here's my 2-cents.

tanjl 

[Dustrega]

That 2 cents might just be worth a lot of time. Good suggestion tanjil.

[bluerondo]

I purchased a Buffalo LinkStation Pro Duo Network Hard Drive - LS-W1.0TGL/R1 from buy.com on 7/7/08 and have it setup Raid1 (mirroring) and I'm backing up data from a Windows XP Pro SP3 computer just fine. Of course it has two 500GB drives and works fine now, but what if I buy two 1TB drives and want to move to them? It looks like it won't work if I shut down the NAS, replace one of the 500GB with a clean 1TB, and then boot it up and allow it to try to rebuild. Of course if I got the one drive to rebuild I would shut it down again and do the same with the second 1TB drive. I saw your post and thought you or someone else might shed some light on my query. I could even start fresh datawise if it will work at all.

[Dustrega]

Essentially any type of upgrade from an existing RAID is going to result in data loss. If you straight replace the disks of course your data is gone. The second option to replace 1 disk at a time is deceptive because a 1 TB drive being introduced to a RAID running 2 500 GB drives will only format to use half of it's capacity will be used because that is what the RAID is specified at (500 GB). Of course when the second drive is put into the array it should adjust itself, right? Unfortunately, the RAID setup is still only specifying a 500 GB partition on each drive so you would have to delete the array and create a new one to take advantage of the upgrade. Bottom line in this scenario is that the data needs to be migrated elsewhere before the upgrade should take place. :(

[parsobarus]

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krisludington wrote:

Oddly, there is no information in the manual for the LinkStation Pro Duo on how to actually restore files made from a backup configured with the unit's Disk Backup features in the HTTP GUI.  What am I missing?

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From what I can tell, there's no way to do an unattended restore. You have to drag & drop the files from the backup drive to the Linkstation. Pretty primitive and inconvenient, especially if you've done a bunch of incremental backups (which I think Buffalo calls "append" backups).