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[gunrunnerjohn]

I found out an obscure way.  I had a RAID-1 array in a DNS-323, and I tried to move them to the DNS-321, thinking they should be compatible.  Well, it didn't work.  Later, I saw someone mention that the drives were reversed, so I took those drives to the DNS-321 again and put them in the opposite slots, they woke up and worked fine.

I currently have a single drive in the unit, and it thinks it's in the Left in status, but it's actually in the right hand slot.

[JoeSchmuck]

I used the left drive first in my build of my RAID 1.  I don't think that would matter but...

I think the best way to proceed is if you have a drive failure, just verify the serial number.  Also, you can access these drives if you pull them out and connect them to a linux system.  If I have a drive failure the first thing I will be doing is booting up Knoppix and copying all the data from both drives to other drives to preserve the data.  Also, I do create DVD backups of all important data, the stuff I would find it hard to replace and I really wanted to keep.  Stuff like photos, documents, some software.

[jackbreuer]

I just experienced exactly the same: The status screen showed that one of my two WD 1.5TB disks in the 1 month old Dlink 321 was missing and the RAID1 array is degraded. After a restart both disks are recognized again but the RAID1 array has to be rebuilt.
Now I wait for an external disk to arrive so that I can backup the data before I do any further steps. I am afraid that the rebuilt might destroy all data. Even if the rebuilt is successful I wonder why this has happened and when it might happen again.

[JoeSchmuck]

I have never had an actual drive failure on my NAS box nor have a had to rebuild my RAID.  I did set the system to manually rebuild the Raid, not automatic.

Also, do you have your NAS on an UPS?  I found a great deal for an UPS at Best Buy two weeks ago for $40.00.  It has the capacity to run the NAS for over 90 minutes, much longer than any of my computers will last during a power failure.  So this results in no network traffic well before the NAS power source fails and hopefully maintaining my data integrity.

I guess what I'm asking is, do you have an UPS for the NAS and it lost the RAID, or are you on regular power, unprotected where a power drop could have caused a data issue?

Also you will here this a lot, always backup your data to a long term storage medium.  I backup my computer to my NAS so if my computer dies, I have the NAS.  If the NAS dies, I have the computer.  Also since I store photos on the NAS, not on my computer, I put those files every month or two on to a DVD-R media.

If you are going to attempt to backup all your data from the NAS drives to a seperate hard drive, if you have a large amount of data, it will take a long time to move that data from the NAS to another drive, possibly days.  I just backed up my entire NAS (725 GB) to a single 1 TB drive.  It took 2 days to copy everything because the NAS has a slow throughput.  You can mount one of the NAS drives into your computer, mount it, and copy it a lot faster.  I wasn't in a hurry but maybe next time I'll opt for the faster method.

-Joe

[jackbreuer]

Hi Joe, thanks for the reply. I don't think that a power outage caused the one harddisk to "disappear". The NAS doesn't automatically restart after, so I would have noticed a power loss.
It really happened during continuous, normal operation, maybe after two weeks. I assume a bad/loose contact but was curious if this has happened to more users as well. Then we have this discussion about WDs new advanced format. Maybe it has something to do with that?

Regarding the backup I fully agree. I have the RAID1 for instantaneous protection against a disk failure (I have already seen many disks dying) and a separate media for backup. I use TotalCommander to synchronize the NAS with the external disk. This way I just copy the differences.
Best regards,
Christian