Rebuilding a NAS appliance RAID array
Disks fail, and RAID arrays need rebuilding. Be prepared for the worst – and keep your clients’ data safe.
Hard disks don’t last forever. The bathtub curve gets you every time, with old drives wearing out and losing data. That’s why RAID systems are a good idea, with RAID 1 mirroring information between two disks and RAID 5 using an array of three or more disks to create a recoverable disk array that can rebuild after any one disk in the array fails.
Business-grade Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances form the backbones of many small office networks, providing a central file and print service where there’s no need to invest in a full-scale server. They also provide additional storage capacity which can reduce the load on an SBS server. Many of these appliances are embedded Linux systems using consumer disks and running them with a workload very different from their original design specifications. Disks will fail, and you will have to rebuild the array.
A 500GB rebuild can take more than eight hours – so be prepared for a late night with plenty of coffee while you watch the progress bars and refresh your browser, or make sure the customer knows the drive won’t be available until you’ve tested it the next morning.