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What just happened? I was getting SMART warnings from a drive I purchased in December (Arsenal refurb from Amazon) and so I replaced it with a new EXOS. Then, two other drives, completely different ones would not remount.

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(@drew1house)
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I bought a new Thunderbay 8 in December immediately after I purchased a brand new 64 Gig M1 Max with an 8TB hard drive. I have mostly EXOS drives in the Thunderbay with 4 8TB drives being turned into one 24 TB raid 5 volume and I have four 12 TB drives that I have in a 36 TB raid 5 volume. They have worked well for the past 3 months. One time one of the drives somehow came out of a set and it took a few days to fix itself but pretty uneventful for the most part. 

Last week I started getting a SMART warning for an eminent drive failure that was pending. So, I ordered two new Exes 16 TB drives. They came last night and I have till the 15th to return these two refurbished bad drives so I figured, Better get em in and let the raid rebuild. I shut down the Thunderbay 8 and replaced the soon to be bad drive with a new EXOS. I restarted the Thunderbay 8 and of the 4 drives in the 24 TB volume one does not show up. The drive will still mount (and these drives are pretty full as I am trying to fully clear off an 8Bay Drobo so I can reformat the into one big volume and so I am cramming all the data into any nook or cranny I can find till I get that one empty.) So, I restart and one drive from the 24 TB volume will not show back up. One from the 36 TB volume will also not show up. Now, I have the SMART error Arsenal drive here still but with 4 volumes to begin with. One Arsenal being replaced and the other 12 TB also not showing up... I have 2 of four drives in this raid 5 that are trying to form the 36TB partition. 

I suppose I could put the bad drive back in and see if I can at least get the data (my BIG Lightroom library) back off of it. This is priceless data. I can probably get most of it off of Backblaze over the course of some weeks but it would be a ROYAL pain and a lot of data would for sure be lost. 

I have disk warrior 5.2 but it will not run on Monterey on an M1. I started up a 3 year old Mac mini and put Disk Warrior on that one... (Still Monterey, which should work for external HFS volumes on an Intel Mac) but I can't mount either of the drives that did not show up as part of their volumes after replacing the SMART drive. And if I try to mount them I get warnings that they will be erased. I have reached out to support via email. They said try pulling the other 6 drives and restarting. I Have done that on both machines and ran verify inside of Soft Raid and each drive says it has 4 issues. (new to me, these were not even the drives I was worried about due to being refurbs and getting the SMART warnings.) But I again, can't mount those two drives without wiping them.  Not sure where to go from here. I have enough room on the now almost empty Drobo to re-insert the SMART warning drive and to see if I can copy that 36 TB off to the new drive. Not sure what to do from here The 24 TB drive can just rebuild the raid onto a new fourth drive as it has 3 of the four still. The really important data is on the 36TB partition.

 This is the support file I downloaded last night. 

 
Posted : 05/02/2022 2:59 pm
(@softraid-support)
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try to avoid "doing stuff" until those two drives start behaving. I thought I gave you advice on this, maybe with direct support.

 

the two 12TB drives may have hardware issues, or perhaps the enclosure, or perhaps they are hung. Buyt they do not show any partition map at all.

What I suggested was only connect the two 12TB drives ,power cycle the enclosure and see if you can get them to start responding. Even move the drives to different slots. As long as they are not responding (no SMART data at all), and have no SoftRAID icon on the tiles, you won't get anything.

 
Posted : 05/02/2022 6:20 pm
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