I am having problems with the RAID array that holds all my media. It is a RAID 5 array with 8 1 TB drives, hosted on an Areca 1220 controller. I have about 6.2 TB of music, movies, TV shows, and photos on there.
On Friday I got a message that the drive on channel 3 had failed and the array was degraded. I got a replacement drive today, powered off the machine, inserted the replacement drive, and powered up. I went into the RAID management software, set the new drive as a hot spare, and it started rebuilding. I watched it get to about 9% done and then went away and did something else. Coming back, I saw that the RAID management software now listed channel 3 as failed again (the new drive). Puzzled, I popped the old "failed" drive into my other machine and it spun right up. I was able to format it and see it in windows no problem. I powered off the machine, re-attached the old drive, and powered it back on. During boot, the RAID card BIOS says that no RAID array is detected. Now is where I start to get scared. I power off, put the old drive back in, and power on. Now it detects the array, still in degraded state, but says that Channel 4 is the bad drive. I did not change any cables around. Advice on what to do? I really, REALLY do not want to lose this array and all my data. It would take me a long time to recover it all. At this point I am concerned that maybe the RAID card itself is bad, or maybe some bad cables, or a bad power supply who knows. But with a RAID 5 array that already has a bad drive, I am hesitant to start troubleshooting that might cause another drive to fail and I lose everything. I guess an option would be to build a completely new system using another storage architecture, like unRAID, which is what I was planning to do in another year. That's really the only way I can think to get my data to safety. But I don't want to spend that money/time now if I can at all help it. --- Brian
