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[Achilles2]

At the office where I work we have a DNS 323 for backups and it has worked decently for a few years. Today we had an odd change: When I went to log in I got shown the setup screen where I could reformat the drive or skip. If I press skip I go the normal menu, but I'm not sure why it showed me this? Could something be going wrong with my drives? (All my data seems to be in tact so I'm not too worried, just curios.)

Edit: Here's the exact message on the screen I get when I login: "Hard Drive Configuration: Your new second hard drive will now be formatted. The existing hard drive will not lose any data."

[ivan]

How are the disks setup RAID 1, STANDARD, JBOD?

Messages like that show that a drive has had a problem, or in extreme cases the unit itself.  It could be down to a power failure and one drive not starting correctly when power was restored thus getting flagged as a new drive, or it is a problem with the drive itself.

Whatever the cause you need to make sure that your backup of the backup is up to date.  In a business situation NEVER rely on a single backup of important data, if the disk it is on has a problem then your backup is gone.   

When you have secured your backup you can test the drive by removing it and putting it into a USB/SATA caddy or adapter, plug it into a computer that has the disk manufacturers disk test tools installed and use them to test the drive.  This will determine if the drive has a problem or not.

If the drive tests OK then put it back and, assuming your disks are setup as RAID 1, let the unit reformat it and rebuild the array.
   

[Achilles2]

The disks are setup standard. What we do is keep one drive in place which all backups go to. The data on that primary drive gets copied over to the secondary drive every night. About every week the secondary is switched out so that a copy can be kept offsite. One of the secondary drives is the one that was having a problem so next time it gets brought in I'll do some tests on it before putting it back in the dlink.

Thanks for your reply!

[ivan]

One thing you should be aware of is that the DNS-323 is not designed for frequent removal/replacement of drives.  Doing so can damage the drive connector socket.

We have a client that used to similar to what you are doing except his disks were setup as RAID 1.  He would pull the LH disk and swop it over, let the unit rebuild the array and then carry on as normal.  This happened every Friday evening until we got a call saying the array wouldn't rebuild.  The problem turned out to be one of the data connectors in the socket had been striped requiring replacing the socket.  He doesn't do stupid things like that any more, at least I hope not    

[JavaLawyer]

Here's a related thread (from some time ago) discussing the pros and cons of this approach: http://forums.dlink.com/index.php?topic=10328.0.

I have to agree with Ivan that it's a bad idea to persistently swap out the HDDs, but more from the standpoint of data integrity -- a much cleaner solution would be to schedule a backup to another physical device.