NAS Setup Frustrations - Synology DNS212J

[pocketdoc]

Need some help

I have a DS422j 4 bay. Don't ask me why, but I set up 2 2tb HDDs as a RAID and the other 2 as another RAID, so I essentially had 2 volumes.

For whatever reason, one of the volumes has a "Failed System Partition". The Storage Manager shows that it is "Verifying disks in the background", but it has not moved past 0%. I cannot access any of the files in file station.

I am not sure what to do at this point other than waiting a couple of days to see if the Diskstation fixes itself.

I have tried reboots, resets, and even took the disks out and tried various ways to access the files by attaching to my Win8 PC. No luck.

 

[50548]

The size of this thread shows that Synology is anything BUT easy to use - I was considering one but this tells me that I should hold off for now...too complicated.

 

[537635]

The size of this thread shows that Synology is anything BUT easy to use - I was considering one but this tells me that I should hold off for now...too complicated.

The size of this forum shows that Apple is anything BUT easy to use - I was considering one but this tells me that I should hold off for now...too complicated.

Yeah, great logic!

 

[50548]

The size of this forum shows that Apple is anything BUT easy to use - I was considering one but this tells me that I should hold off for now...too complicated.

Yeah, great logic!

Logical fallacies don't help here - the guy asked a simple question and got 57 replies which haven't yet solved the issue...Synology setups are not easy, period.

 

[blueroom]

Need some help

I have a DS422j 4 bay. Don't ask me why, but I set up 2 2tb HDDs as a RAID and the other 2 as another RAID, so I essentially had 2 volumes.

For whatever reason, one of the volumes has a "Failed System Partition". The Storage Manager shows that it is "Verifying disks in the background", but it has not moved past 0%. I cannot access any of the files in file station.

I am not sure what to do at this point other than waiting a couple of days to see if the Diskstation fixes itself.

I have tried reboots, resets, and even took the disks out and tried various ways to access the files by attaching to my Win8 PC. No luck.

Do you mean a DS412j? A 2 drive RAID is mirroring and it sounds like one of the primary drives has failed. Pull the bad drive (should be indicated by its status LED) and replace it with the same type HDD. You should be able to rebuild.

Windows cannot read EXT4 drives, it's probably done more damage than good connecting it.

Remember RAID is not a backup, and you should be externally backing up your NAS (this applies to any NAS or HDD).

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The size of this forum shows that Apple is anything BUT easy to use - I was considering one but this tells me that I should hold off for now...too complicated.

Yeah, great logic!

Not much more complicated than setting up a router. Synology NAS's are great devices, they do everything they're designed to do very well.

 

[537635]

Logical fallacies don't help here - the guy asked a simple question and got 57 replies which haven't yet solved the issue...Synology setups are not easy, period.

And how would you call judging a line of products from a single web forum thread? My line wasn't a new fallacy, but intended to expose the previous one.

NAS devices are not DAS, nor USB hard disks. They are a bit more complicated, but especially Synology DSM is made with novice users in mind (great interface, lots of wizards (dyn dns, setting up volumes...)).

Thread starter actually hasn't made any mistakes. You can create volumes in a lot of ways. Point was only, that making RAID instead of SHR can bring problems when upgrading down the road.

 

[pocketdoc]

Do you mean a DS412j? A 2 drive RAID is mirroring and it sounds like one of the primary drives has failed. Pull the bad drive (should be indicated by its status LED) and replace it with the same type HDD. You should be able to rebuild.

Windows cannot read EXT4 drives, it's probably done more damage than good connecting it.

Remember RAID is not a backup, and you should be externally backing up your NAS (this applies to any NAS or HDD).

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Thanks for the advice. I must have been in a hurry. It is a 411j.

The disks themselves show up as healthy, the partition is apparently faulty. The last time I was able to see the status in Storage Manager, it appeared to be rebuilding the drives. Now when I select File Station or Storage Manager, it will not connect or says that there are no shares.

When I took the disks out to connect to my PC, I know that they are Ext3 or 4 and windows cannot read them. I downloaded and tried various apps that are supposed to read, and even went so far as to install Linux on a disk and boot from that, but no luck.

Maybe I did screw them up. I hope not.

I will try your advice to take one of the disks out and see what happens.

 

[blueroom]

If they all show as healthy then it sounds like something else is wrong.

Not sure what to suggest but for future reference...
RAID is good for getting it up and running quickly if a single drive fails, it's not a backup.
HDDs will eventually fail.
Make sure you have an external backup strategy for the NAS; either offsite, USB drive, another NAS.
RAID 1 (mirroring) is quite wasteful, if you're rebuilding from scratch you could try using all four drives as a single RAID array.
A drive setup as part of a RAID volume is unreadable outside the array it was setup on.

My setup is a DS212j as two volumes (one volume is Time Machine backups only) and an external USB HDD that backs up the non TM volume weekly. Critical files are stored on a Cloud Station folder and sometimes DropBox.

I don't bother with RAID as I can live with the downtime when a drive goes down. If I lose the TM drive I don't mind beginning another backup on the Macs.

If you have unlimited ISP bandwidth your DS211j could be setup to backup to the cloud such as Amazon's S3 or another rsync target device.

 

[pocketdoc]

I always thought that when you set up a raid array, esp 3 or more HDs, that when one went bad, you just swapped it out.

So when you say that raid is not a backup, you mean that if the NAS or raid goes bad, you can't get to your files.

When an external backup to the NAS is made, is the external HD formatted EXT like the NAS?

I am starting to think that the NAS raid setup was a waste of 4 hard drives...

 

[blueroom]

A RAID is designed to be fault tolerant of a single HDD failure. If two drives fail or the NAS itself fails you're going to need to restore from a backup (usually externally).

A backup means two or more copies of any given file stored on different physical devices.

A RAID can be used as a backup device, but if it contains files that are unique then you're going to have to figure out how and where to backup (copy) them to.

Media hoarders tend not to backup their often massive RAID setups. Go figure.

 

[fat jez]

I always thought that when you set up a raid array, esp 3 or more HDs, that when one went bad, you just swapped it out.

Depends on the RAID type used. If it's RAID-0, then you lose all your data (but it's good for performance). RAID-1 mirrors the data across two or more disks, so each disk has a duplicate copy (wasteful of space, but gives redundancy so the loss of a single disk does not lose all your data). RAID-5 (what my Synology uses) takes the benefits of RAID-0 (performance) and adds an extra disk to give redundancy, providing only 1 disk is lost. But you still lose the capacity from this redundant disk.

Essentially with RAID, you can't have redundancy without some loss of capacity.

 

[priitv8]

Actually 4-Bay Synology allows itself to be set up for 2-drive redundancy as well, which essentially yields 2 RAID-1 pairs, ie. half of the total disk space will be useable.

A RAID is also not a backup in the sense, that anything conciously/accidentally deleted is gone for good. If you had a backup, you could void your impulsive deletion later

 

[pocketdoc]

I was able to retrieve my files by removing one of the disks. Thanks for the advice? Now I have the arduous task of transferring everything over to the new one.

Educate me about backing up an NAS. If I have, for example, 4 2 TB disks in a SHR, and I plug a 2 tb external drive into the back and set up a backup, how is the external formatted? Is it the same EXT3, or can it be a format read by windows? EXT3/4 wouldn't make sense unless you were on a Linux machine.

Thanks for the help!