NAS Drive Failure

On a list of things you don’t want to read [first world problems] is:

Drive 2 on this device is at risk of failing, please replace.

I guess there are worse things that this such as:

Drive 2 has failed.

Both drives have failed.

But still, it was enough to make me worry a little. My data on the NAS is organised in Raid 1 configuration so that both drives are exact copies, just in case one of them fails.

I spent some time investigating new NAS drives and making sure that I have space to expand but I think that will have to wait a few years. I would like a three or four bay device with two 2TB drives to start. I would only use Raid 1, but this configuration could potentially give me 8TB of data storage. I currently have used about 0.5 TB on the current NAS and that is after two years of ownership so I shouldn’t worry too much about needing the space until my sons get older.

I ordered a Western Digital 1TB Red drive as the WD website said that it was a suitable HDD for the ix2 series of NAS. I had planned for the whole operation to take an hour but in reality it took about 10 minutes and that was with me taking my time. Really impressed with how simple it was to replaced the drive.

Here’s the NAS.

Iomega IX2-200 CLoud Edition

After removing the two screws on the base of the device I removed the old disk 2.

Sliding out old drive

Unscrewed the old HDD from the plastic casing.

Old HDD in enclosure

Screwed the new HDD into the casing.

WD Red

Slid the new HDD and casing into the NAS enclosure and replaced the screws in the bottom of the device.

WD into NAS

Placed NAS back in its place in the “tech corner” of the house and turned it on.

After a lot of drive reading and writing it was ready for log in access and the control panel said it was rebuilding data protection [most instructions I read had said I would have to authorise this action]. I will amend this once the data rebuild is complete.

This whole process was pretty simple and I’m impressed with Iomega for the drive and am feeling quite smug at the moment.

NAS Drive

For my birthday I bought a 2TB NAS unit. I spent ages looking at different types and was going to get a LG NAS until I saw an Iomega unit in PC World in BlueWater Shopping centre with quite a good price reduction. I did some internet searching that evening and went back the next day to buy the Iomega unit.

I got the Iomega StorCentre ix200 Cloud Edition there are some good things about it and some things that to be honest I don’t understand and can’t be bothered to invest the time to understand.

I use the NAS to store movies, iTunes libraries and eventually I will categorise all our photos on it. I can stream content to the PS3 and iPhones and laptop which is useful. I can also access it via the web should I feel like it! Here’s a list of functions I won’t be using:

  • Flickr upload folder – automatically uploads to Flickr
  • Bit Torrent download automatically
  • Time Machine
  • Print Server
  • Cloud backup
  • Facebook folder (see this about Facebook)
  • You Tube upload

I have the two 1TB drives configured as RAID0 at the moment which, as far as I understand it, means they copy each other for data redundancy. If I ever need the extra space I’ll turn that off as I also back up photos and video files to DVD. Can you have too much redundancy?