RAID Woes

I have a Synology RAID box, which is fairly old but reliable and set up in RAID 5 – 4 drives and you loose one as a back up. Today it suddenly stopped turning on.
Investigating on the internet if the hardware itself had died the options seemed fairly limited. The RAID needed the controller – you can’t just plug the drives into Windows and see what was on them.

One option – get another box and put the hard drives into it and hope they work. Given the RAID box is £400-£500 not a brilliant idea!

The other option seemed to be setup an Ubuntu Linux system and through some command line work hope you can remake the RAID. Not for the faint hearted.
If I had not been able to do either of these all the data on the RAID box was lost. Maybe if it had been mirrored or JBOD (just a bunch of disks) they drives would be readable but as RAID 5 the data is spread over all the drives.

After a lot of fiddling I managed to get it working again but it is a timely reminder that just because something is RAID 5 doesn’t mean you should rely on it 100%. Now it is up and running I will make sure I back up everything important and see how it goes.

The RAID box is old, as are the drives – they probably will die soon but, of course, when they do it is too late.

Hopefully someone else might be prompted to back up their import stuff as a results of this – even if it is on an expensive RAID with back up built-in.