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[HenrV]

One of my HDD's in the 323 crashed last week. The other one appears to be fine. When I run the 323 with just this drive I can access files on the HDD with no problem (it just appears a lot slower and viewing media like a movie from the NAS just doesn't work anymore).
I got a new HDD of the same capacity and tried to synchronize this one with the remaining HDD. This however doesn't work. When I access the management software through the web interface and I manually start rebuiling the raid the minutes just keep going up, instead of down. When it reached over " 200.000 minutes remaining" I powered off the device. This can't be right.
I thought my remaining drive had crashed as well during the sync, it just ticked a bit every few seconds, but after removing the new HDD and restarting all my files were still there and the drive works fine. So apparently synchronizing causes a hang.

I hope anyone has any ideas on this.

Drive 1 is a Maxtor DiamondMax 22, STM3500320AS
Drive 2 (the new one) a Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS
I have the latest firmware on the 323.

[ivan]

Am I correct in assuming that your original setup was RAID 1?

If it wasn't why are you trying to rebuild the RAID array?

Do you have a full backup of your data that you could use to restore if necessary?    

Are there any other symptoms that might indicate that the DNS-323 is the problem?

[HenrV]

Yes it was Raid 1. It now says Raid 1 degraded. So I put in the new HDD and pressed ' manually rebuild now'.
And no, I don't have a backup of most of the data on the remaining HDD.
I think the problem is with the remaining HDD. It is very slow, hardly can copy stuff from it to my computer now.

By the way, what kind of file system does the 323 use? EXT2/EXT3/EXT4?

[ivan]

OK, there are two things you should do.

First make a backup of your data by either plugging the good disk into a usb/sata caddy or adapter and copying the contents to somewhere safe.  The format will be either Ext2 or Ext3 depending on firmware and choice when you did the initial formatting.

If your PC operating system is windows you will need either an IFS driver or a program that can read Ext2/3 (see the sticky for info about them) - DON'T let windows do anything to the disk.

If you are using Linux then you should have no problems reading the drive.

Once you have your data safe then run the seagate/maxtor disk tools utility and get a full analysis of the drive.  You could also do that on the 'dead' drive to check that it is in fact 'dead'.  We had a client that reported a 'dead' drive and when we tested it there was nothing wrong with it.  It turned out the 323 had a dry joint that caused the apparent failure.   

[HenrV]

I've done everything you suggested already, I bought a docking station yesterday but couldn't find a way to access the disc. Then, by searching the web, I found a solution today, called Ext2fsd, which allows me to read the HDD in the dock from my Windows computer and copy the contents.
I am transferring everything from the remaining drive to my laptop now.
I have also bought two new 1TB drives, doubling my capacity in the NAS and hopefully giving me years of worry free use of my 323. I don't think I will be using the old Maxtor HDD anymore. It's 5 years old, maybe better not to rely on it anymore.
In a few moments the configuration of my new discs should be ready. Hopefully everything works. If not, I'll be back!