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4 disks used as RAID-5 vs. 8 disks used as RAID-5

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(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8008
Member Admin
 

Once you have gone as far as you can (without deleting) send a support file to support@softraid.com.

 
Posted : 07/10/2016 5:40 pm
(@barrysharp)
Posts: 61
Member
Topic starter
 

OK... will do. Just waiting for the BIG-3 backup to complete. When BIG-3 backup done I will capture a Tech Support file and email that to support@softraid.com along with a reference to this posting. Hopefully that will be enough data for analysis.

After sending the Email I will be deleting BIG-2/3/4 and then will recreate them and restore them from their backups.

Again, based on what you've posted I don't understand why I cannot "Add Disk..." for BIG-2, BIG-3 and BIG-4 as they only have a single yellow line pointing to D1 as I said before.

 
Posted : 07/10/2016 6:25 pm
(@barrysharp)
Posts: 61
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Topic starter
 

I was not able to get around the "Add Disk..." issue/error for BIG-2, BIG-3 and BIG-4 Volumes. So I was able to Delete them and Remake them.

I'm now restoring these three Volumes from their backups. This will take some time as each one is about 2.7 TB worth of data.

I will now create a Tech Report and send it in.

The important thing here is that there's been no loss of data..... which is what RAID-5 is all about with a single disk failure, right ?

Thanks for your help.

 
Posted : 07/10/2016 7:27 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8008
Member Admin
 

It appears there was minor partition map damage to a second disk, which prevented SoftRAID from adding disks to the other RAID volumes.

We will do a post mortem in the labs next week, and if we can find a/the bug in SoftRAID that caused this to happen, we will add that in the next update.

Thanks for your patience on this.

RAID is about "Data availability". It is not the same as backup. As you unfortunately discovered, disks can fail, but your data remained available while you fixed the situation.

Our goal is to make the "repair" process as easy and seamless as possible. In that context we failed to make it easy to just replace the disk. We will use your tech support file to figure out why and fix this for future customers.

 
Posted : 07/10/2016 11:18 pm
(@barrysharp)
Posts: 61
Member
Topic starter
 

Thank you for your attention to this matter. It's appreciated.

The positive thing in all this is, we did not lose data. The backups did go slowly but that was because the RAID-5 Volumes were in degrade state but access to the data was possible without data loss. Thank goodness we did not lose a 2nd disk in the process.

 
Posted : 08/10/2016 12:08 am
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8008
Member Admin
 

We are investigating features that include such things as additional parity disks, and other features that will help users protect data. We understand how difficult it is to back up terrabytes of data, so want to do what we can in this area.

 
Posted : 08/10/2016 12:38 am
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