What's the best way to handle 2 of 3 hard drives with errors?

[Clobes]

Hello. Well, as soon as I bought new hard drives to expand my storage, I started getting hard drive errors. The new drives aren't even here yet...

 

I have 3x 4tb WD Red drives in my array, and my parity + one of the storage drives are reporting errors. I don't quite know if this explicitly implies data corruption, but hopefully there's a way around this mess without incurring such.

 

I have two new 4tb Red drives on the way, so I'm curious as to what is the best approach for saving the array.

 

- Replace parity drive first, then let it rebuild?

- Replace the data drive first, then let it rebuild?

- or something else that I'm not considering?

 

Diag file is attached.

 

Thanks.

cortana-diagnostics-20211221-1242.zip

[JorgeB]

Start by running an extended SMART test on the problem (or all) disk disks, then post new diags, make sure spin down is disable before starting the tests.

[Clobes]

Running SMART extended tests now. Thanks.

[Clobes]

@JorgeB SMART tests just finished. I went ahead and did all 3 disks and it seems everything came back as passing. So that's interesting. I've attached the new diag file. Thanks.

cortana-diagnostics-20211221-2132.zip

[JorgeB]

Now run a non correcting parity check.

[Clobes]

@JorgeB

Non-correcting parity check just finished, no errors reported. New diagnostic is attached. Thanks again for the help.

cortana-diagnostics-20211222-1310.zip

Edited December 22, 2021 by Clobes

[JorgeB]

So all disks are good for now, two complete surface reads were successful, SMART test + parity check, if you still want to replace them to expand you have to start with parity, if you don't need to expand for now just keep monitoring them.

[Clobes]

Well that's great news. Any indication of what caused the errors? Anything I should be super concerned about or just a fluke? I did have a bit of a misadventure a few months ago when trying to upgrade to a Ryzen system which, among other issues, led to several dozen hard crashes which I can't imagine were good for the drives. I'm back on stable hardware now though.

 

At any rate, I guess now that I have a clean bill of health (if I'm not misunderstanding), I'll proceed with the expansion.

 

Thank you again for the help, I really appreciate you taking the time. 

[JorgeB]

12 hours ago, Clobes said:

Any indication of what caused the errors?

Difficult to say for sure, the errors were logged as actual disk problems, and these can be intermittent, but sometimes cable issues are logged as disk issues.