I have a Synology NAS with 5 2TB drives in it. One is making an annoying clunk... clunk... clunk... noise every 5-10 seconds.

SMART stats look OK, although one drive has 9 years of run time on it!

The 5 drives are in an SHR array with 1 drive's worth of redundancy.

I want to replace the oldest drive, thinking it's the one making the noise -- but would feel really stupid if another drive failed while I did that!
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On Thu, 31 Oct 2024 08:22:32 -0700
"poindexter FORTRAN" (46:1/115)
<poindexter.FORTRAN@f115.n1.z46.fidonet> wrote:

I have a Synology NAS with 5 2TB drives in it. One is making an
annoying clunk... clunk... clunk... noise every 5-10 seconds.

SMART stats look OK, although one drive has 9 years of run time on it!

The 5 drives are in an SHR array with 1 drive's worth of redundancy.

I want to replace the oldest drive, thinking it's the one making the
noise -- but would feel really stupid if another drive failed while I
did that! --- SBBSecho 3.20-Win32
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Roll up a piece of paper, put it against your ear then the other end
against each drive and you might be able to figure which is giving the
loudest clunking.
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On Thu, Oct 31 17:45:18 -0500, you wrote:

Roll up a piece of paper, put it against your ear then the other end against each drive and you might be able to figure which is giving the loudest clunking.

I was just going to tell him to turn the music up louder so you didn't hear it, much like you should also do when your car starts making wierd noises. :D

Regards,
Nick

... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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Re: Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
By: Accession to nelgin on Thu Oct 31 2024 16:39:08

I was just going to tell him to turn the music up louder so you didn't hear it, much like you should also do when your car starts making wierd noises. :D

That reminds me, I need to install an amplifier...
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Accession wrote to nelgin <=-

I was just going to tell him to turn the music up louder so you didn't hear it, much like you should also do when your car starts making wierd noises. :D

I usually work with headphones on, listening to ambient tracks - but
every once in a while I don't - that's when I hear it.



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On Fri, Nov 01 01:56:06 -0500, you wrote:

I was just going to tell him to turn the music up louder so you
didn't hear it, much like you should also do when your car starts
making wierd noises.

That reminds me, I need to install an amplifier...

Damn, it's /that/ loud, eh? :)

Regards,
Nick

... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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On Fri, Nov 01 15:41:00 -0500, you wrote:

I usually work with headphones on, listening to ambient tracks - but
every once in a while I don't - that's when I hear it.

Welp, that's where you went wrong, then.

Anywho, why would you think that another drive would fail while you replace the bad one?

Regards,
Nick

... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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Hello nelgin,

31 Oct 24 07:45, you wrote to poindexter FORTRAN:

I have a Synology NAS with 5 2TB drives in it. One is making an
annoying clunk... clunk... clunk... noise every 5-10 seconds.

SMART stats look OK, although one drive has 9 years of run time on
it!

The 5 drives are in an SHR array with 1 drive's worth of redundancy.

I want to replace the oldest drive, thinking it's the one making the
noise -- but would feel really stupid if another drive failed while
I did that!

Roll up a piece of paper, put it against your ear then the other end against each drive and you might be able to figure which is giving the loudest clunking.

wow. smart :)

Regards,
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Re: Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
By: Accession to poindexter FORTRAN on Fri Nov 01 2024 04:50 pm

Anywho, why would you think that another drive would fail while you replace the bad one?

Murphy, combined with old drives. 82K, 27K, 3K, 64K and 78K hours.
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On Fri, Nov 01 23:42:36 -0500, you wrote:

Anywho, why would you think that another drive would fail while you
replace the bad one?

Murphy, combined with old drives. 82K, 27K, 3K, 64K and 78K hours.

Looks like you may need 3 drives, then. Do one, cross fingers. Rinse and repeat. :)

My server is fairly old, and I don't even know how to look up how many hours each hard drive has been used. But there's no clunking, yet, so here's hoping we just let it ride and hope for the best!

Regards,
Nick

... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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Accession wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

On Fri, Nov 01 23:42:36 -0500, you wrote:

Murphy, combined with old drives. 82K, 27K, 3K, 64K and 78K hours.

Looks like you may need 3 drives, then. Do one, cross fingers. Rinse
and repeat. :)

And that begs the question - these are all 2TB drives. Do I look at
larger drives? Apparently, you can replace RAID elements with larger
drives, and once they're all replaced, expand the RAID volume to use the
unused space.

Or, I could get larger drives, wipe the volume, create a volume with
fewer disks and save space for a hot-swap?




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Hello Accession,

02 Nov 24 07:57, you wrote to poindexter FORTRAN:

Anywho, why would you think that another drive would fail while
you replace the bad one?

Murphy, combined with old drives. 82K, 27K, 3K, 64K and 78K
hours.

Looks like you may need 3 drives, then. Do one, cross fingers. Rinse
and repeat. :)

My server is fairly old, and I don't even know how to look up how many hours each hard drive has been used. But there's no clunking, yet, so here's hoping we just let it ride and hope for the best!

smart tells you.
on linux you can check:

# smartctl -a /dev/sda
[...]
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 021 021 000 Old_age Always - 57908
[...]



57908/24 = 2412 days, approx 6 years :)

Regards,
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Hello poindexter,

02 Nov 24 09:42, you wrote to Accession:

Murphy, combined with old drives. 82K, 27K, 3K, 64K and 78K
hours.

Looks like you may need 3 drives, then. Do one, cross fingers.
Rinse and repeat. :)

And that begs the question - these are all 2TB drives. Do I look at
larger drives? Apparently, you can replace RAID elements with larger drives, and once they're all replaced, expand the RAID volume to use
the unused space.

Or, I could get larger drives, wipe the volume, create a volume with
fewer disks and save space for a hot-swap?

no worries, you can expand the raid volume, if all drives are changed. ez-pz.

Regards,
--
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On Sat, Nov 02 16:42:00 -0500, you wrote:

And that begs the question - these are all 2TB drives. Do I look at
larger drives? Apparently, you can replace RAID elements with larger drives, and once they're all replaced, expand the RAID volume to use the unused space.

Or, I could get larger drives, wipe the volume, create a volume with
fewer disks and save space for a hot-swap?

How full are the drives?

At the point of replacing all the drives, I'd probably backup my important stuff, do a clean install to start completely over.

You have a lot of options. :)

Regards,
Nick

... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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On Sat, Nov 02 20:10:34 -0500, you wrote:

My server is fairly old, and I don't even know how to look up how many
hours each hard drive has been used. But there's no clunking, yet, so
here's hoping we just let it ride and hope for the best!

smart tells you.
on linux you can check:

That's assuming you have it installed and configured, yes?

Doesn't seem to come with Archlinux, but it is a part of the package smartmontools, which I just installed.

# smartctl -a /dev/sda
[...]
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 021 021 000 Old_age
Always - 57908
[...]

57908/24 = 2412 days, approx 6 years :)

$ sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda
smartctl 7.4 2023-08-01 r5530 [x86_64-linux-6.11.5-arch1-1] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-23, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Vendor: VMware
Product: Virtual disk
Revision: 2.0
Compliance: SPC-4
User Capacity: 536,870,912,000 bytes [536 GB]
Logical block size: 512 bytes
LU is fully provisioned
Device type: disk
Local Time is: Sat Nov 2 18:07:14 2024 CDT
SMART support is: Unavailable - device lacks SMART capability.

[...]

Error Counter logging not supported

Device does not support Self Test logging

[EOF]

Not looking too good so far, but at least VMWare tells me this:

Date/time on host
Saturday, November 02, 2024, 21:32:46 UTC
Install date
Friday, October 13, 2017, 16:51:03 UTC

However, I bought the server used off ebay, so I have no idea how long it was ran before that. :)

Regards,
Nick

... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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Anywho, why would you think that another drive would fail while you replace the bad one?

gotta rebuild/resize the array to add a disk. even if you catch the dying one in time there's a non-zero chance the pressure of the operation kills something else.

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Or, I could get larger drives, wipe the volume, create a volume with
fewer disks and save space for a hot-swap?

2tb drives? depending on how many bays you have left... just create a new volume, copy all your data to it, and remove the old drives TBH. all of your data would fit on one drive at this point.

if you don't have the bays left to create a new volume i'd get an external disk adapter, temporarily copy your data to a new disk, remove the existing array completely, and then build a new volume from new disks.

none of this cheap, of course, but...

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jinkusu wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

Or, I could get larger drives, wipe the volume, create a volume with
fewer disks and save space for a hot-swap?

2tb drives? depending on how many bays you have left... just create a
new volume, copy all your data to it, and remove the old drives TBH.
all of your data would fit on one drive at this point.

if you don't have the bays left to create a new volume i'd get an
external disk adapter, temporarily copy your data to a new disk, remove the existing array completely, and then build a new volume from new
disks.

5x2TB drives, which works out to 7.2 TB. I'm about half-full, so I could
get by with replacing the drives. I just cleared out 1.7TB of BBS
backups which I didn't need... :)



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Re: Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
By: poindexter FORTRAN to Accession on Fri Nov 01 2024 04:42 pm

Murphy, combined with old drives. 82K, 27K, 3K, 64K and 78K hours.

Oddly, I swapped the first drive, but smartctl doesn't reflect the correct stats for the new drive - unless I bought a drive that also had 82k hours on it!
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On Mon, Nov 04 21:44:58 -0600, you wrote:

Murphy, combined with old drives. 82K, 27K, 3K, 64K and 78K hours.

Oddly, I swapped the first drive, but smartctl doesn't reflect the
correct stats for the new drive - unless I bought a drive that also had 82k hours on it!

Do you have to do some sort of resync after you swap, by chance? Or should it automatically detect all of that?

Regards,
Nick

... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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Re: Clunk. Clunk. Clunk.
By: Accession to poindexter FORTRAN on Tue Nov 05 2024 04:58 pm

Do you have to do some sort of resync after you swap, by chance? Or should i automatically detect all of that?

It's all GUI-based. It detects that a drive is missing, that there's a new drive in there, and wouldn't you like to rebuild your array? It rebuilds the drive from the parity info, took about 4 hours.

I ended up buying 3 more 2TB drives, going to swap them out as I go.
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On Tue, Nov 05 19:03:46 -0600, you wrote:

It's all GUI-based. It detects that a drive is missing, that there's
a new drive in there, and wouldn't you like to rebuild your array?
It rebuilds the drive from the parity info, took about 4 hours.

No matter what, it wouldn't refresh the new drive's life cycle? Did you
buy it new or used?

I ended up buying 3 more 2TB drives, going to swap them out as I go.

Atta boy, I knew you had it in ya! :)

Regards,
Nick

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Accession wrote to poindexter FORTRAN <=-

No matter what, it wouldn't refresh the new drive's life cycle? Did you buy it new or used?

It took a reboot, now it shows 89 hours. Phew!




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On Thu, Nov 07 08:36:28 -0600, you wrote:

Ac> No matter what, it wouldn't refresh the new drive's life cycle? Did you
Ac> buy it new or used?

It took a reboot, now it shows 89 hours. Phew!

Aha! Glad to hear you were able to make some sense of it.

Regards,
Nick

... Take my advice, I don't use it anyway.
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