[Discuss] DIY NAS

[bene at klatsch.org (Ben Eisenbraun)]

On Mon, Apr 09, 2012 at 10:54:15AM -0400, Daniel Barrett wrote:
> Matthew Kowalski <matt.kowalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> >I've had success with the Synology DS1511+ units in the past....
> 
> When you say "success," do you mean your Synology has successfully
> recovered from RAID drive failures?
> 
> My 5-drive Synology DS508 had a single drive failure last week, its first
> in 4 years, and it took everything down with it. The RAID5 volume stayed in
> a crashed state, even after replacing the bad drive and SMART-testing all
> drives. Synology support was no help, except to tell me to use the "reset
> to factory defaults" feature. I did so, and it turned the DS508 into an
> expensive brick, unable to be accessed at all. Very disappointing....

Hmm, I thought one of the selling points for Synology is that they are
just running Linux+md+LVM under the hood, so you can always fall back to
stuffing your hard drives in to $RANDOM_LINUX_BOX and get access to your
data.

It sounds like you didn't have a chance to try that approach, but if you
haven't created a new RAID volume yet, it might be worth doing a bit of
spelunking to see if you can get the md volume running again in a bare
Linux box.

-ben

--
there is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the 
proportion.                                        <francis bacon>