MacBreak Tech > G4 NAS Mk1 had a failed drive!

 

I came into the office to the sound of something not unlike a very unhappy animal trapped under a Dremel. I knew right away that was the sound of a drive gone bad. usually you get days warning but this one was normal on last Wednesday and not normal today. the Disk Utility tool showed me which drive was bad. which was Disk 1. so I powered down, opened the case, unplugged Disk 1, and powered back on to see if the screaming stopped. it did. ahh, silence.

 

fortunately I have a spare drive(s) for this server. they weren’t that much money to begin with so it made sense to buy more at the time. there’s no telling when the next drive will fail. and for that time when only one drive is doing the work it’s not a good time to be waiting for more drives to arrive. the better to have a way to keep RAID1 alive is to have drives waiting in the wings.

the new drive had to get formatted. and once that was done I dragged it to the RAID window to add it to the list. it warned “adding this drive will destroy it’s contents.” because I named it something different I clicked yes and it started it’s rebuild. which, according to a progress bar, should be complete in about 5 hours.

total time to complete all the steps for that swap was about 15 minutes.

lessons:
drives fail. have spares.
RAID1 is an okay backup. but you should have an archive strategy for the long term.
listen for the signs of pending failure.
run one of the two apps that will notify you of a failed drive on OS X.
work or play think about how