We have a Linkstation Pro Duo set up in RAID1, and have had no problems so far, thankfully. I wondered if anyone could clarify what exactly happens if a drive fails, and what are the best settings to plan for this eventuality.
I used to have the email notification feature set up, but since changing ISPs, this no longer works because the ISP requires a login for the outgoing mail server, which the Linkstation does not seem to have an option to provide. So, if a drive were to fail, how would I know about it? Would the system continue to work normally with just one disc in operation? Would the client machines display any error to say that one of the discs has failed, or would it rely on me checking the Linkstation web interface?
There is also an option in the RAID setup tab to automatically shut the unit down when a RAID error is detected. This is probably a silly question, but if this were to happen, would it then let me boot it back up again, in order to copy the data from the surviving disc to another device? Or would the device then be effectively bricked - and I would have to physically remove the good drive from the unit and install it in a spare PC?
Thank you for any advice / experiences!!
Tom.
Without using email notifications it will give you a flashing light (yellow i) or the red light would flash in a rythm of long and then short blinks. Most of the time you should be able to go into the gui and see what drive had failed and then try a disk check, then a format, then try to rebuild the raid array. If a disk fails outside of the one year warranty period you can power device down, remove the shell with a few screws and then you should be able to remove the drive and replace it with a similar spec as in 7200rpm, same capacity drive, 8mb of cache usually. Power up the device, and format it to xfs, then you should be able to rebuild the array. To read the data from one of these drives you will need a linux based computer to view the xfs file system.